The Tyrant's Law

Cithrin watched it all with dread, but also a strange sense of relief. At least this time, she wasn’t the only one worried. At least Suddapal understood.

The work of the bank also quietly shifted. Depositors came to withdraw their wealth, often arriving at the compound late in the evening rather than coming to the market houses. Even these were often taken as letters of credit rather than the actual coinage, but some coin did spill out. Isadau, on the other hand, began buying debts. If a taproom owed its brewers three months’ payments for their beer, Isadau paid the brewers half the full price today. If the taproom made its payments, the bank’s profit would be massive. If it burned, its owners and workers dead under Antean blades, the money would be lost utterly. Once, Cithrin had chafed under the timid strategies of her notary, Pyk Usterhall. Now she watched Magistra Isadau buy as much as she could of a city doomed to be conquered, and the risk of it took her breath away and left her giddy. It was optimism forged out of silver coins and paper contracts. A statement that Suddapal might change, but it would not be destroyed, that business done now, in the face of disaster, had meaning. It was banking as patriotism, and something more. Faith, perhaps.

But along with it, Cithrin noticed new entries in the books. Payments and expenditures marked with Isadau’s personal chop. Money given quietly without expectation of return to men and women whose names were not recorded. Subsidies paid to the weak and vulnerable to help them escape before the storm. The beginnings of a network of ships, farms, businesses, warehouses that might also last beyond the arrival of the Antean army and give those many, many people who didn’t or couldn’t leave some hope of escape. The city, and with it the bank, had become a thing of hope and desperation and calculated risk.

It was late at night, and Cithrin was in her room tracing through the connections that Magistra Isadau was building when the scratch came at her door. The sound was so soft, so tentative, that at first she thought she’d only imagined it. Turning the page of her ledger was louder. But it came again.

“Come in?” she said, still half expecting no one to be there. But the latch lifted and the door swung open. Roach stood framed in the doorway, his leather cap in his hand. His scales—light brown when he’d first come to work for the bank, had darkened with age and the summer sun. He looked older and slimmer. He nodded.

“Magistra,” he said. “I was wondering … That is, I was hoping for a moment of your time.”

Cithrin closed the ledger’s cover, but kept her thumb between the gently pinching pages to mark her place. Roach stepped in and closed the door behind him. His nictitating membranes opened and shut rapidly as a bird’s wing and he held his hands at his side in fists. Cithrin wanted to call him by his name as a way to reassure him, but she couldn’t remember it. Harver or Hamil. When she saw him, all she could think of was Roach.

“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked, trying to put the comfort into her voice the way Magistra Isadau did.

“I was hoping, Magistra, that you might be able to help arrange a meeting with Merid Addanos. For me. With me.”

Anxiety radiated from him while Cithrin racked her brain. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t recall where she’d read it. Or no. Not read. Heard. Not one of the depositors, she didn’t think. Roach cleared his throat.

“Magistra Isadau’s cousin,” he said. “Merid. Maha’s mother.”

“Oh,” Cithrin said, and then a moment later. “Oh.”

“I can resign if you like.”

Cithrin withdrew her thumb. The pages of the ledger closed over the gap like water. She put her palm to her forehead, pressing gently while she gathered her thoughts. Roach wasn’t one of the few who knew Cithrin’s past and secrets. He thought she was considerably older than she actually was, and likely assumed she had more experience than he did. That was a mistake on his part.

“How … ah … how serious is the situation.”

“It’ll need a priest,” Roach said. “And a wedding cup.”

“Oh. Well then.”

“I’m very, very sorry, Magistra Cithrin.” Roach’s voice was shaking. “I know that becoming involved with a member of the household was a betrayal of your trust in me and a failure of my duty. And I can just hope that you … that you can …”

“Oh stop. Let me think.”

She would have to speak with Isadau first. And Yardem. She wished she knew how the pair of them would take the news. Certainly it wasn’t the first time in history that a young woman and a professional soldier had found themselves possessed of an unexpected third party. Cithrin thought for a moment about the pregnancies she’d been lucky enough to avoid and shuddered.

“Give me a day or two to lay the groundwork,” she said. “I will do what I can.”

“Thank you,” Roach said, and turned to go.

“Wait, Ro—Wait. A moment.” He paused. Cithrin gathered herself. “Isadau and I may be shifting some of the capital from Suddapal to Porte Oliva. The ship will be heavily guarded, of course, and I’ll want someone from my branch there to oversee it. Make sure nothing goes missing between here and home.”

“Ma’am?”

“It will get you and Maha out of the city.” She could see the struggle in his expression; leaping hope fought with shame. She thought she understood. “I would have needed to send you or Enen regardless. All you’ve done is make the choice of which a bit simpler.”

“Yes, Magistra.”

After he left, the door closing quietly behind him, Cithrin let her forehead sink to the table. Her personal guard was getting the magistra’s family pregnant. How lovely. And, in the shadow that was falling over them all, how obvious. Cithrin put on her cloak and walked out through the corridors. The compound was emptier than she was used to. There was music, but it came from a long way off, and it wasn’t the bright, lively sound of dancing. She felt a knot tying itself in her gut and knew that her choices were to drink herself to the edge of sleep or stay awake until morning. Neither appealed, but they were all she had.

She found Yardem at the watch fire alone. The flames lit the back of his head and glittered off the rings in his tall ears. He never sat facing the fire. She sat next to him, her hands between her knees.

“Ma’am.”

“Yardem,” she said.

Across the road, someone struck up a mournful tune on a violin. The eerie reeds of a bellows organ rose with it. Yardem held up a wineskin, and Cithrin took it, wiping its mouth on her sleeve after she drank. It was a bright taste, and it warmed her throat, but it didn’t have enough bite to it to affect her thinking. She looked out at the night, trying to see the buildings and streets, lanterns and alleys of Suddapal the way she imagined Yardem did. No walls to speak of. Streets too wide to block. Commons big enough to field an army. History had made Suddapal a wide sprawl of a city. Rich with the trade from the Inner Sea, safer than the Keshet, and natural partner to the Free Cities and Pût. Indefensible. Even if the Imperial Army arrived exhausted and half dead from thirst, Suddapal would fall.

There was nothing she could do to stop it. No hope she could offer up. She wondered whether Magistra Isadau would leave when the time came, or go down with her city like the captain of a sinking ship. She wondered how long she would stay and watch or go back to Porte Oliva. It was the time for asking questions like that.

“Looking bleak, ma’am.”

“The situation or me?”

“Meant the situation, but either works. Talked to Karol Dannien this morning. He says the defenses are going up at Kiaria. It’s the traditional stronghold. Thick walls, deep tunnels.”

“And are they going to fit everyone in Suddapal into it?”

“No.”

“Half?”

“No.”

“One in three?”

“Two in ten.”

“So the city falls with most of the population still in it.”

“Yes.”

“Isadau’s putting together a group to smuggle people out afterwards. She hasn’t told me, but it’s what she’s doing.”

“Brave.”

“Doomed.”

“That too,” Yardem agreed. “But it’s her people. Her family. Likely a third of the people in Suddapal are related to her if you squint hard enough. People do that sort of thing for their families.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“There’s more than one kind of family,” Yardem said. “It’s the kind of thing the captain would have done for you.”

“If you say so.”

Yardem sighed and drank more of the wine. Cithrin closed her eyes.

“Yardem?”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s Roach’s real name again?”

“Halvill.”

“Halvill’s gotten the magistra’s cousin’s daughter pregnant.”

“That’s a problem,” Yardem said. A moment later, he chuckled. Cithrin found herself smiling too.

For a while, they laughed.

Marcus

The mountains changed when they got close. The air still tasted of dust and the sun still pressed down on them like it bore a grudge, but before, the rise and fall of the land had been rough and stony. Here, it became knifelike. They skirted the village, but the spoor of goats and men in the few, weedy meadows made Marcus nervous. They were in the enemy’s land. Every turn meant the risk of another chance encounter. Kit promised that the path they were taking was the least traveled, only of course he didn’t say it that way. He said, I believe it is the least traveled, and I expect there will be fewer people here, constantly reminding Marcus that his guide was decades out of date. In truth, almost anything could have changed in that time, and something almost certainly would have. The only question was what.

And still, Kit knew the landscape well enough to be a guide. Without him, the long dry paths would have taken months to pass through instead of weeks. And all along the way, they talked of what still lay ahead.

“The great temple has a statue of the goddess,” Kit said as they walked through a defile so narrow Marcus could touch both sides with his outstretched fingers. “The hral kaska is through there, and down.”

“Hral kaska?”

“In the old tongue, it means something like ‘private chamber.’ ”

“Past massive golden statue, into bedroom of incarnate goddess. All right,” Marcus said. “Do you have any idea how big she is? Physically, do goddesses run the size of horses or houses?”

“I was never allowed past the outer chamber. I never saw more than a glimpse of her. But I have heard her breath.”

“So at a guess?”

Kit frowned

“Houses.”

“Lovely.”

“From what I was told in the temple and the stories I’ve gathered in my travels, I believe that you need only cut her. The poison of the blade will end her.”

The gorge tightened and began to slant upward. Marcus let Kit go ahead, then followed, the mule’s woven leather lead in his hand. The mule snorted but made no other comment.

“Any thoughts how quickly this ending would happen?” he asked. “A long, lingering death that gives her time to slaughter me doesn’t do as much good as a sudden collapse.”

“I don’t know,” Kit said.

A long shelf stood at the top of the rise, the stone marked by shallow indentations where rain had eaten away at the softer stone. Far below them, a great wall stood, massive sentinel statues along its top. Thirteen figures eroded to facelessness by water and wind and time, with the spread wings of a vast dragon above them all. Banners flew by each of the statues, all in different colors, and all marked in the center by the same sigil: a pale circle divided in eight sections. The sign of the spider goddess. From above, the great iron gate looked like the mouth of a gaol. The ironwork above the gate seemed to form letters, but Marcus couldn’t read the script. Behind the wall, the living face of the stone was marked by caves and paths.

“That’s the temple?”

“The home and seat of the spider goddess over whom deceit has no power.”

Marcus squatted, looking over the edge. Practiced eyes took in the details of the hundreds of openings. The paved space at the wall’s base. What might have been a simple well, with a man in a brown robe kneeling beside it.

“It looks … empty. How many men are in this.”

“When I was there, we were almost five hundred,” Kit said, his voice bitter and gentle at the same time. “The best and strongest children of the villages, chosen by fate and skill for service.”

“Did you sleep in shifts?”

“Hmm? Oh. No, we slept at night and kept the temple during the day.”

“So this is the busy time.”

Kit nodded. Marcus adjusted the sword against his back.

“Not many people at home. All off bringing truth to the unwashed, I suppose. Better for us. This back way you were talking about. Where down there would it put us?”

Kit described the rest of their path, as best he recalled it. Marcus listened, considered. What he wanted more than anything was to draw the blade, charge in swinging, and God help any man who stepped in his path. He wouldn’t, though. They’d come too far and through too much to fail now. The wise thing was to wait for night and make it as far as stealth could take them. Then, if he had to, he would fight his way through the last of it, and try to sink one good stroke on the body of the monster before the priests took them down.

He felt tired, but also alive in a way that reminded him of who he’d been as a younger man. He’d plotted the death of King Springmere for months, putting each piece in position until the man who’d ordered his wife and daughter burned lay dead at his feet. Then, he had been fueled by anger and the lust for revenge. Now, he mostly felt weary. It took the better part of the afternoon, sitting in the shade of a great stone, before he figured out why. Both plans ran to a point and then stopped. If he died when the job was done, then he died. If he didn’t, he’d have to come up with something else.

The night was dark, the moon low. Marcus tied the mule to a gnarled pine that had found purchase in the stones. If he and Kit died, the priests would find it, maybe give it a nice life hauling water while humanity descended into chaos and war. The path wound through the rocks, higher into the mountain, through a short tunnel as black as closing his eyes, and into the halls of the temple. Kit lit a thin stub of candle and led the way. The passages were high-ceilinged and round. They reminded Marcus of the holes that worms ate in rotten wood. Doors loomed in the shadows and passed away behind them. Kit moved quickly and silently, with a sense of certainty. The passage opened into a larger chamber. A slight breeze made the candleflame gutter, and Kit cupped it with his hand. The air was hot as breath.

“Any idea where we are?” Marcus whispered.

“I believe so,” Kit replied. “The great chamber should be through the next hall, and then—”

“Who’s there?” a rough voice asked. “Atlach? Is that you?”

Marcus reached out and tapped Kit’s candle out with his palm. A soft and flickering light remained, dim shadows dancing on the vast stone wall. An old man stepped around a corner, a brass lamp held above his head. His white hair looked only a lighter shade of grey in the darkness. Marcus stepped away to the side and eased the blade out of its scabbard. Kit, understanding his part, lowered his head and stepped forward. The old man came closer.

“Atlach?”

“No, I’m afraid I am not.”

The old man raised the lantern higher.

“Who—” he began and then stopped. Marcus saw his eyes go wide. “Kitap?”

“Ashri, isn’t it?” Master Kit said. “You were younger when I saw you last.”

Marcus waited. The old man took a step back. In the dirty light, his face had become a mask of revulsion and horror. His chest swelled as he drew breath to scream the alarm, and Marcus slipped the sword between the bones of his spine just where his neck widened into shoulders.

The old man fell, his lantern clattering to the stone. Oil spilled, and the flame grew bright. Marcus dropped the blade and hurried to right the lamp before the fire grew worse. As the flames spread and smoked, the light in the chamber grew brighter. Benches lined the walls, and a dais stood in the room’s center, but nothing made from wood was near enough the oil to catch fire. Ancient markings in white and red filled the walls.

“Sorry about that,” Marcus said, lifting the lamp away from the flame.

“About what?”

“Killing your old friend,” Marcus said.

Kit nodded, then shook his head.

“We weren’t close. I think he’d have been just as pleased to kill us. And look.”

Marcus turned to the body. At first he didn’t see anything, just an old man in a pool of blood that seemed to echo the burning oil. Then, as the flame brightened for a moment, the tiny spiders that boiled up out of the old man’s wound were visible. Tiny black bodies whirling in mad distress, pulling hair-thin legs tight to pinpoint bodies. Dying. Marcus handed the still-lit lamp to Kit, took the sword by its hilt, and pulled it free. The blade glittered green and red and a black as dark as a starless sky.

“Good to know it works,” Marcus said. “We should hurry.”

The temple reached deeper into the mountain than Marcus had imagined. The great carved arches drank in the light from their little lantern and spat it back in the browns of sand. Marcus followed along after Kit, his blade ready. The old actor’s steps rarely faltered, and when they did, only briefly. Once, they heard distant voices lifted in song, the echoes making any sense of direction impossible. But the voices faded, and Kit motioned him forward.

There was something else, something eerie, about the place that for a time Marcus couldn’t quite put his hand to. At first he thought that there was something off about the angles of the spaces, as if the stones were set in some subtly wrong way. But in truth it was only that he had never seen anything so ancient that had no dragon’s jade to it at all.

The great chamber was a vast darkness that swallowed the light. Marcus could only judge by the hushed echoes of their footsteps that the space was vast. As they moved quickly, almost silently, between two huge pillars of beaten gold, Marcus looked up to see the vast, shining body of a spider above him, the pillars its legs.

“Come along,” Kit hissed, and Marcus realized he’d stopped in his tracks, overwhelmed by the size of the thing above him. As he followed Kit’s silhouette down the dark passages, the fear grew in his belly and thickened his throat. He didn’t let himself think, only willed the numbing terror to be exhilaration instead. This was no different than charging into battle or holding a wall against a hundred siege ladders. At worst, it was death.

Kit stopped at a wide black door. The black wood shone in the madly flickering light. A wide bar in iron brackets as thick as Marcus’s leg kept it closed.

“Here,” Kit said, and the dread in his voice was unmistakable. And behind that, a deeper sound like a vast, rolling exhalation. The breath of the goddess. Marcus smiled.

“Well then,” he said. “Help me with this bar.”

It took both of them to lift it, and Marcus was sure that the noise would bring the priesthood running in alarm or startle the beast on the far side of the door. But no one came, and the vast sound of the goddess didn’t alter. Marcus steadied himself. The blade was longer than he usually liked, but nicely balanced. He didn’t have any armor, not even a thick jacket. Speed and surprise were his only hope. And the poison of the blade.

He closed his eyes. He knew any number of men who made peace with their God before they went on the field. He thought of his family. Merian and Alys were waiting there, cut into his memory like scars. He felt the old love and the old pain again, the way he always did. Maybe this time, he thought. Maybe this time it’ll be the last. For a moment, Cithrin was there too. Cithrin who might be alive or dead. Cithrin, who wasn’t his daughter, but could have been. He opened his eyes. Master Kit was looking at him nervously.

“It’s been good working with you, Kit. I’ve enjoyed your company.”

“I’ve also enjoyed traveling with you. I think you are a genuinely good man.”

“You think a lot of strange things. Open the door.”

Kit pulled on the bracket. The door inched open, a ruddy light spilled out, and the sound grew louder. Marcus steeled himself, then ran through, knees bent and body low. The chamber had high stone walls with a dozen braziers of low, smoky flame. The beast stood perfectly still in the center of the room, a massive spider twice the height of a man. A low stone altar squatted before it. The light glittered from eight massive eyes and mandibles long as a man’s forearm.

Marcus leaped forward, vaulting over the altar, and swung the blade at the closest leg. The impact numbed his finger, and he let the force of his charge carry him forward, under the massive body. Both hands on the hilt, he thrust up into the vast belly. The blade rang with the force of the blow and skittered off the spider’s carapace. With a cry of despair, Marcus pulled back for another strike, ready to feel the hooked claws grabbing at him, the knives of its mouth ripping his flesh.

The spider goddess hadn’t moved. Marcus swung again twice, before the oddness of it sank through, and he stopped. Tentatively, he reached out the sword, poking at the joint of the nearest leg. The clack was of metal against stone. He lowered the blade. The rushing of air filled the room, but the beast’s abdomen didn’t shift. Carefully, sword at the ready, Marcus stepped to the great, many-eyed head. The fire of the braziers reflected in each eye.

“Kit?” Marcus called.

For a long moment, there was no answer.

“Marcus?”

“This isn’t going quite as I’d pictured it.”

Kit stepped through the door, his eyes wide and filled with barely controlled terror. Marcus pointed to the spider’s great leg and hit it with the flat of the blade.

“This is a statue.”

“Be on your guard,” Kit said. “It may come to life.”

“It also may not,” Marcus said, but a twinge of anxiety passed through him all the same. He moved away from the vicious mouth. Kit stepped closer. He was trembling so badly Marcus could see it.

“She’s petrified? Turned to stone?”

“I don’t think so. Look here, where the feet meet the floor. You can see the chisel marks.”

“Where … where is the goddess? There must be a deeper chamber. A secret path. She must be close. Her breath—”

“That’s not breath, Kit. That’s air moving. There’s been wind running through these caves since we got here, or all the fires would have suffocated all these priests years ago and saved us the trouble. No offense.”

“None taken,” Kit said by reflex. He put his hand on the spider’s leg where Marcus’s first strike had chipped it. The fresh stone was white and grey. The actor licked his lips, his gaze flickering over the massive beast as if searching for some hidden meaning. When he spoke, his voice was weaker. “They may have taken her. Moved her to some—”

“Kit, has it occurred to you that this goddess might not be real?”

“But her gifts, the power she gives. You’ve seen it.”

“Have. And those little bastards in your blood too. Those I won’t deny. But that’s all I’ve seen. I don’t know what’s giving it power.”

“There must be a central force. A will to direct it. There has to be—”

“Why? Why does there have to be?”

Kit sat on the empty altar, staring up at the many-eyed face. Tears welled up in his eyes, streaked down his cheek to disappear into the thick grey brush of his beard. He coughed out a single, painful laugh. Marcus sheathed the blade and sat at his side. The statue looked down on them, motionless and blind.

“There is no goddess, is there?”

“Might be, but no. Probably not.”

“It seems I’m an idiot,” Kit said. “I thought I had overcome her madness. I thought I had questioned everything, but …”

“Well, there may have been madness to overcome. Just maybe it wasn’t a goddess. Plenty of crazy to go around if all you have are priests.”

The fires in the braziers fluttered in the breeze. Marcus thought he saw, high up along the walls, where the air shafts were hidden by curves in the stone. Whoever had built the chamber, however many centuries ago, they’d been brilliant. Controlling the air flow alone would have been impressive.

“It’s what I feared, isn’t it?” Kit said. “All of it. All the tales and histories. All the sermons. I think they were all just children whispering to each other down through generations, each believing and repeating what the one before had said, all the misunderstandings building on each other, until anything became plausible. Not a mad goddess, but human dreams and fears given the reins.”

“We should probably have this conversation someplace else, Kit. If your old friends come and find us here, they’re not likely to thank us for pointing all this out.”

“Why?” Kit said, and Marcus recognized the despair in his voice.

“Why won’t they thank us, or why should we leave?”

“We came to kill a goddess and break her power, but there’s nothing here to break. Nothing here to die. She can’t be stopped if she doesn’t exist. What’s happening out there is only men lost in a terrible sort of dream. I don’t know how to stop that. What sword kills a bad idea, Marcus? How can we win against a mistaken belief?”

“I don’t know,” Marcus said. He rubbed his hands together, the soft hissing of his palms a counterpoint to the deep rumble of the false breath. “But someone did.”

“What do you mean?”

Marcus spoke slowly, the thoughts forming as he spoke them.

“This temple is a hiding place. The men like you have been out of the world for centuries at least. Maybe all of history. Something put you in here. Something scared your however-many-generations-back predecessors so badly that they crawled off to the ass end of nowhere and pulled the desert up over their heads. Something drove them here.”

“Can you think what?”

“No. And I can’t think how we’d find out. And if we did, I don’t have any reason to think it’s the sort of thing we could manage. I’m only saying it’s been done before, so it can be done. And we should find out how.”

Kit pushed his fingers back through his wiry hair. His tears had dried, but the salt tracks still marked his cheeks.

“Where do we start?” he asked.

Marcus rose to his feet and put a hand on the spider goddess. The stone was warm and hard and dead. There was a vast world outside. Nations and races tearing themselves apart, blood and war and tragedy. He didn’t have any idea where to start looking for the way to stop it. And then he did.

“Suddapal,” he said.

Clara

Flor and Daskellin, I understand, but I can’t imagine him getting on with Mecilli at all. And of course Emming will fit right in,” Clara said. “The man is full of argument and bluster, but only so no one will notice he never has an opinion of his own. Could you pass the butter, dear?”

Sabiha handed across the jar. The butter was white and fresh, without the waxy cap or echo of the rancid that Abatha Coe’s had. The bread was soft and pale, the eggs and pickles served in a fashion that reminded her of mornings in her own solarium, back in some previous lifetime. At these occasional and treasured breakfasts with her family, her first impulse was to wolf everything down and eat enough that she wouldn’t have to put another bite past her lips for a day. Her second was to pull back, to take only what she would have taken and leave what she would have left. The first would have been rude to Jorey, and the second would have been untrue to herself, so she usually managed a middle path.

“Well, the line to the Lord Regent’s council chamber got a bit shorter after last year. It would have been Father and Lord Bannien at the table,” Jorey said, and then, changing the subject, “I heard from Vicarian. I have letter for you from him as well.”

“Oh good. How is he, poor thing?”

“There was a call for men to study under Minister Basrahip,” Jorey said, his voice intentionally casual the way it always was when he was trying not to have an opinion. “He’s thinking of volunteering.”

“I’m surprised,” Clara said.

“He thought it might help show that his allegiance is to the throne,” Jorey said. “And it would bring him back to the city. They’re rededicating Minister Basrahip’s temple. They’re actually going to put it inside the Kingspire. He’d be able to come for lunch whenever he had an open day.”

“Besides,” Sabiha said, “it’s Palliako’s pet cult, and anything to do with the Lord Regent is astoundingly fashionable.”

“Even that dreadful leather cloak of his,” Clara said, hoisting an eyebrow. “I’ve seen it everywhere, and really, it doesn’t suit anyone well. Jorey, dear. I was meaning to ask. Whatever became of Alston?

“The guardsman? He’s here. Lord Skestinin took him on when the household …”

“I thought I remembered that,” Clara said, smiling to herself. “I must look in on him and pay my respects. It takes so little, you know, to maintain those relationships, and good servants are so rare. Now, Sabiha, dear, tell me all about that dinner at Lady Ternigan’s. I haven’t seen any of the new dresses, so you must describe everything.”

The danger for her was that it was so easy here. So comfortable and calm and welcoming. Some of that drew, she was certain, from Jorey and Sabiha’s guilt at turning her out. Some was the decades of practice she’d put into being Lady Kalliam, Baroness of Osterling Fells. But some was deeper. There was a genuine love between her son and his wife, and unaffected kindness was a pleasure to be near, even if only for a moment. Clara wanted to gossip and laugh and tell stories from when Jorey had still been in his small pants and watch Sabiha’s delight and Jorey’s blush. She wanted to be that woman still.

But already they had said things that she knew, despite her best intentions, would be in the next letter to Carse, and she didn’t want that. Jorey might say something that only he knew, and if then if the letter was intercepted, suspicion would fall on him. The fact restrained her, but it didn’t stop her.

And after breakfast, and after Jorey had discreetly given her a week’s allowance and kissed her cheek, she stopped at the servants’ quarters, found a private corner, and had a serious conversation with Alston the guardsman.

Four days later, she woke early, left her rooms, and met her old servants. Rain soaked the predawn streets, and the birds sang the songs that came before the light. The tiny, cool drops tapped against Clara’s cheeks and ran in an invisible runnel down past her collar and into the space between her breasts. Alston walked behind her, a looming darkness inside the darkness. His cloak was oilskin the deep brown of freshly turned soil. The other men with him were likewise dressed. The proper clothes, she thought, for the proper occasion. It was good to know the basic rules applied everywhere.

The taproom near the Silver Bridge hardly deserved the name. It wasn’t a business so much as an excuse for one—beer went in and and piss came out—but it was also the sort of place where men with no name slept during the daylight and stolen coins and food appeared without questions. The lantern by its door was filled with oil and lit only because Clara had snuck it away and put it back herself. And that only because she needed to see the faces of the men who stepped out to the street. Clara had been waiting for less than an hour when the rude little door swung open and four men tumbled out, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The only good thing she’d discovered about Ossit and his friends was the regularity of their habit. Three Firstblood men and a Kurtadam. The middle of the three Firstbloods was unmistakably Ossit, the man with the knife who would, she was certain, have split her from heel to throat if Abatha Coe hadn’t distracted him.

Alston must have seen the reaction in her stance, because he didn’t ask whether these were the men they were waiting for. He stepped forward, and the two men with him followed. Clara came behind. After all the time she’d spent and work she’d done to arrange this, it wasn’t something she could look away from.

From the way their conversation stopped and they closed ranks, it was clear that Ossit and his toughs sensed the danger even before the first of her old guardsmen stepped out of the shadows. Three of her men loomed up in the street before Ossit. Clara, Alston, and two more took station behind the enemy, blocking their retreat. The bared blades on both sides caught the light like tiny flecks of lightning.

The Kurtadam was the first to stop. His grin was wide enough to show teeth. The blade in his hand was long for a knife, short for a sword. Ossit, to his left, had the same curved blade he’d brandished at her in the boarding house. The other two had clubs of wood with their ends dipped in lead.

“Looking for trouble, are you, then?” the Kurtadam growled.

“Only delivering what was ordered,” Clara said, and the men started at her voice.

“Who in fuck are you?” the Kurtadam asked.

“Put down your weapons and come to the magistrates,” Clara said. “I’ll see you’re not hurt.”

“We’ve got numbers and experience on you,” Alston said. “No reason to do something you’d regret.”

“Well, then,” the Kurtadam said. “I guess there’s nothing to be done, then.” The words were calm, but the tone still spoke of violence.

“Put the weapons down,” Clara said again. The Kurtadam glanced at the three men around him and shrugged. With a shout, the four of them dashed toward the three men farthest from Clara, knives and clubs swinging. Alston said something obscene under his breath, and he and the other two dashed after them. She hesitated, and then followed. She had heard swordplay before. She knew the sound of blades. There was none of that here, only the thick masculine grunting, dull sounds of impact, and a cry of pain. She couldn’t tell whose voice it had been. Street fighting was mean and it was ruthless. Honor had no place here. One of Alston’s men—her men—lay in the gutter, his fingers holding in a long loop of intestine. The Kurtadam put his back to the wall, his long knife dancing in the pale and growing light. With a shout, one of the bandits leaped past Alton’s wide form and came pelting toward her, his club gripped hard in his fist.

“Lady!” Alston shouted, but too late. The attacker was too close for Clara to flee from, too close for anyone to intervene. Clara tasted the coppery flush of fear, but held her ground. She had never trained to fight—it wasn’t something ladies did—but Dawson had spoken to her many times on the strategies and tactics of a duel. The first rule was not to do what the enemy expected. A young man with a lead-tipped cudgel running at an unarmed woman in her middle years. He’d assume she would shy away, turn from the blow. Clara’s eyes narrowed.

The club rose in the air, ready to splatter her brain on the cobbles. Clara stepped in toward the man and brought the point of her toe up into his sex with a force she hadn’t used since she’d been a girl with rough cousins. The man’s yelp was as much surprise as pain, and he hunched forward, barreling into her. His shoulder struck her just under her ribs, and she felt the breath blow out of her. His club fell to the ground, bounced along the cobbles, then rolled. She sat down hard on the pavement, her hands to her belly, fighting the urge to vomit. The man scrambled to his knees, tried to stand, but Alston was on him.

“Are you well, my lady?”

“Fine, thank you,” Clara said, hauling herself to her feet.

The men had been subdued. One of her guards had Ossit’s face pressed in the gutter and his arm bent cruelly back. The clubman who hadn’t assaulted her lay on the walk, his hands held to his face and black with blood. Only the Kurtadam remained on his feet, his hands lifted in a surrender that managed to speak defiance.

“Well done,” Clara said. “We’ll take him to the magistrates.”

“You,” the Kurtadam said. “I remember you now. You’re the high-class bitch from Coe’s rooming house. I knew I’d heard your voice before.”

“I am,” she said. “And you made a mistake when you chose to steal from my household.”

“You made a mistake when you stepped in the street,” the Kurtadam man said and spat. “Go ahead, then. Take me to the magistrate. Hang me in a cage. It won’t be the first week I’ve spent pissing down the Division. But ask yourself what you’ll do when they pull me back up, eh? So how about instead you let my boys go and we call it truce. You made your point. I got it. The house is yours, we won’t be back that way again.”

Alston knelt beside his fallen man. The guard’s face was pale and the bright pink loops between his fingers meant he needed a cunning man quickly or a grave digger slow. Dawson would have tied them all to the wall outside the compound and whipped them until the bones showed. But that had been when he was a baron and meting out justice was his right. If he had been here now, if he had seen her with the muck of the street on her skirts and the thugs threatening her in the still-falling rain, he would have been outraged. She thought of Vincen lying in his own blood. Of Dawson, slaughtered before the full court. Outrage was yet another luxury she could not afford.

“I don’t think I can trust you,” Clara said, surprised by the coolness of her voice. The resolve in it.

“Madam, I need to get Steen to help,” Alston said. “He’s falling into shock.”

“I understand.”

“Well,” the Kurtadam said, “what’s it to be, then? March us off to the magistrate and have an enemy for life, or you go your way, take care of your boy with the open gut, and I’ll go mine.”

“Will you give me your word of honor that you will exact no revenge?” Clara asked.

“You have my word,” the Kurtadam purred.

Clara hesitated for a moment, caught between two versions of herself, and unsure which was the true one. Her inclination was to let the man go, and farther down the road have him appear in the night with his knives and laughter again. She knew in her bones that was how the story would go, and still the power of compromise was so ingrained in her soul that it was hard to turn away from. For so many years, the rules of court and etiquette said that a man was to be taken at his word, and if he should break it, the humiliation was his. Old rules for old times. Ruthlessness was called for now. And so, ruthless she would be.

“Your word,” she said, “isn’t worth shit. Alston?”

“Ma’am?”

“Will you please kill these men and throw the bodies in the Division?”

The Kurtadam’s eyes went wide as Alston sank his blade in the man’s belly. Ossit cried out in despair, but it cut off quickly. Clara watched them die, and a part of her died with them. She had seen pigs at the slaughter. She had seen bodies hanging from the gallows. The two together gave the proceedings some context, but they did not make them easy.

I’m sorry, she thought.

The morning traffic across the Silver Bridge took no particular notice of her or of the grime on her hems. The blood on them. Mules and carts moved behind her, crossing from one side of the city to the other while she stood in the center with the memory of her husband. I’m sorry, she thought, and then knew the word was wrong. Not sorrow. She was horrified, of course, but that wasn’t what had brought her here either. Regret had and the sense of something ending, but nothing so apologetic as sorrow.

Dawson, my love, she thought, speaking each word without giving them voice. I would have stayed the same for you if I could. I loved being the woman you loved. I miss her. I miss you. Perhaps I should have been more careful of myself. Not done things that would change me.

Behind her, a man cursed and a horse snorted. Before her, crows spiraled down into the depths of the earth. The depths of the city. The rainclouds had cleared, and the morning sun drew steam from the streets. It poured over the sides of the Division like fog settling. She looked to her left. Vincen Coe stood at the edge. His face was pale, but his spine straight. He didn’t look at her. Hadn’t asked where she’d been or what she’d been doing. She knew already that she wouldn’t tell him and that this new woman she’d become was the kind who could keep secrets. Secrets made anything possible. They made her free, but alone. The price was small.

The Kingspire seemed almost to glow in the morning light. The vast new banner—the red of blood, the eightfold sigil—hung from its heights, marking the newly founded temple. On the far side of the Division, a troop of men herded another group of Timzinae children toward the prisons. The small, brown-scaled bodies moved slowly. Clara had seen the way exhausted children moved, the slackness of their joints and the dullness in their eyes, the same for every race. Even from halfway across the Division, she recognized it. These were the prisoners Geder had prepared for. She closed her eyes for a moment.

There was so much to mourn. And so much that could still be lost. One of the guards shouted out abuse. Another laughed. Servants of the Severed Throne every one of them.

She wanted to say it was Palliako who’d done it all. That Geder’s sins had infected the city, the kingdom, and the world. In a sense, she even believed it was true. Except that none of those men driving children from their homes and families had a knife to his throat. None of the women at court were forced into the black leather cloaks. They did it, all of them, because it was easier for them not to weigh their loyalty against their conscience. Palliako might be the occasion of it, but she herself was evidence that the choice belonged to each of them. She wondered how many other loyal traitors there might be out there, thinking private thoughts much like her own. She wondered how she might find them without too terrible a risk. She noticed that she wasn’t thinking about Dawson.

Clara gathered herself together, put a pleasant smile on her lips, and turned away from the bridge. It was the nearest thing she had to a tomb for her husband, and it left her heart feeling empty to know she wouldn’t feel the need to come back to it.

Vincen smiled and nodded when she stepped back onto the solid ground of the street. Apart from a paleness to his skin that the days hadn’t quite erased, the only sign he had been near death was a scar of living silver where the cunning man had called on angels or spirits or dragon’s art to fuse flesh that wouldn’t have mended. She had seen it when she sat by his side, nursing him back to strength. With his shirt on, it wasn’t visible. She took his arm and wrapped it around her own. It felt different than it had the times before. Likely it was only that he held himself more carefully, but she liked to imagine it was also that she had changed as well.

“Are you well, my lady?” he asked. The formality in his voice told her that he knew the answer, and that it was no.

“I have been thinking, Vincen,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Writing letters has been very useful in gathering my thoughts,” she said, “but I feel the time has come for something more.”

Cithrin

The trick to moving the wealth of the bank was not being seen to do so. If word went around that the Medean bank was leaving Suddapal, it would cause any number of problems. The people still under contract with the bank would stop paying their loans, because why give money to someone who wouldn’t be present to take the complaint to the magistrate? The scent of coin and cloth would call pirates and bandits, making it less likely that the goods would survive the trek to Porte Oliva. Tax assessors and agents of the city’s governor, seeing the wealth trickling away, would want to eke out as much as they could quickly, before the chance disappeared. Or the high council might send guards to take command of the gold and use it to hire mercenaries, if any mercenaries would accept the work.

So Cithrin and Isadau carved the wealth of the bank into smaller pieces. A private crate sent in a caravan through the Free Cities that purported to hold bolts of cotton actually contained silks. A message box sealed with lead and wax sent by courier carried gems and jewelry. An earthenware statue sent as a gift to Pyk Usterhall, notary of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, was hollow and filled with coin. Technically, it was smuggling, since they only paid the tax on what the goods appeared to be and not what they were. Cithrin’s conscience didn’t bother her on the point. If the governors of the five cities couldn’t assure the safety of her bank, they had already broken their end of the contract. Besides which, every other business and family with ties outside Elassae was doing the same.

Roach—Halvill, dammit—and Maha married in the private chapel at the compound amid great revelry. The priest was the same she had seen on her very first Tenthday, and he used his skills as a cunning man to make his voice sound grand and resonant. She caught Yardem rolling his eyes and shared his amusement. But when the guard and the pregnant girl sipped from the wide silver wedding cup and swore to make the journey of this life in company, Cithrin found herself inexplicably weeping.

They were slated to leave the next day on a ship bound for Cabral with enough of the bank’s capital that, if they stole it and ran, they’d be able to set up a very pleasant life together in Far Syramys. But they wouldn’t. Halvill would put it on a cart and trek back to Porte Oliva, just the way he’d promised. Halvill and Maha had forged a new family, it was true, but they both had other ties. Halvill to the bank, Maha to her family and, because of that, the bank.

Before that, Isadau had arranged a party that would fill the compound for a day and a night. It was a bit more extravagant a celebration than the union of a minor bank guard to a girl with an occupied belly warranted, but Suddapal was in need of reasons to celebrate. And so was Isadau.

Cithrin wore a dress of pale blue with highlights of cream and a ribbon in her hair. The colors went well with the paleness of her skin and hair inherited from her mother. For jewelry, she chose a thin silver chain necklace. More would have been ostentatious. She knew, looking into her mirror, that she looked too young. Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour was supposed to be almost a decade older than she actually was, and she knew what Master Kit and Cary would have said. Darken the lines under her eyes, deepen the folds that ran between nose and cheek. Stand with her weight lower in her hips. Tonight, though, she decided to let herself be younger. They all knew her already. Opinions were set. And it was a relief to step out of herself, if only for a moment.

It was also uncommon for the employees of the bank to take part in the celebrations as if they were equals, but Halvill’s family had insisted that Yardem and Enen sit among them, and so when Cithrin stepped out of her room, Yardem stood before her in the long formal robe of a Tralgu priest. Red tiles as big as her thumbnail marked the collar and ran down the left side. If he had still been an acting priest, they would have been on the right. She only knew that because he’d told her. The air was warm with high summer and the smell of fresh bread and basil mixed with the strumming of guitars. Cithrin doubted there would be much sleep in Isadau’s compound that night.

“You look handsome, Yardem,” she said. “You can cut quite a figure when you put your mind to it.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Wanted to speak with you before the revels began, though.”

Cithrin glanced back toward her room in query. Is this a private conversation? Yardem nodded, and they went back inside. Yardem sat on the end of her bed, his elbows resting on his knees. She leaned against the door. She could have taken the chair, but she didn’t want to disarrange the drape of her dress.

“All respect, ma’am, but I think it’s time we considered leaving Suddapal.”

“Is there word from Inenetai? Did the Anteans break the siege?”

“Not so far as I know,” Yardem said. “But there’s other news. Karol Dannien’s taken contract to man the walls at Kiaria. They’ll be boarding up his school at the week’s end and going north. I don’t think there’s any question that the war’s coming here, and if he’s going, it means it’s likely to be here soon.”

“And better if we weren’t here to greet it,” Cithrin said.

“Hear it’s lovely in Porte Oliva this time of year,” Yardem said grimly.

Outside her window, glass shattered and someone laughed. She crossed her arms.

“You know I can’t go,” she said. “Komme Medean was clear about the terms. A year’s what he called for. It hasn’t been half that. If I walk away now, I’ll have broken my contract with him.”

“All respect, but he didn’t know he was sending you into the wrong side of a sack.”

“No,” Cithrin said, “he knew he was sending me to a bank. Navigating wars is part of what we do. Or floods. Or plagues. It’s not as if the business only runs on sunny days. If I leave now, Komme will be right to wonder what I’d do if something happened in Porte Oliva. I wouldn’t leave there, and I won’t here.”

Yardem’s ears turned back, but he didn’t say more.

The yard of the compound was bright with fireflies, and the first of the torches were being lit. The men and women who came for the party weren’t the highest in the five cities. The affair might have been held by the Medean bank and Magistra Isadau, but it was still the wedding of a minor guard. Instead, there were carpenters and brewers, dyers and shipwrights. The artisans and small merchants of Suddapal come to glory together. The women wore flowing dresses or fashioned metal corsets or the stained trousers and blouses they’d left work in. The men wore formal robes of silk brocade or rough-cut canvas belted with lengths of rope. No one was overdressed for the occasion, and no one too casual. It wasn’t possible to be.

The compound’s servants carried out a wide wooden table, then hurried back to fill it with plates of glazed ham and fresh shrimp and roast lamb. Bottles of wine were opened and tuns of beer tapped. And instead of retreating back to their quarters, the servants stayed in the yard. They didn’t mix with the higher orders of guests, but neither did they avoid them. The music rose with the darkness, bright strings strumming against each other, mixing melody and percussion until the stars themselves seemed to throb with it. Cithrin ate a little, drank a lot. The constant knot in her belly, so familiar that she hardly noticed it anymore, loosened a notch, and she felt the blood warm in her cheeks. She heard a woman whooping at the edge of the yard, and a moment later saw a band of ten men leading a cow straddled by Isadau’s sister, Kani. She was listing wildly, and the cow looked, to Cithrin’s admittedly tipsy eyes, long-suffering and patient. A young Timzinae man she didn’t recognize asked Cithrin to dance with him, and she found that she was, in fact, drunk enough to do so.

It wasn’t about Halvill or Maha. It wasn’t about Isadau or paying respects to the bank. It was about fear, and the joy that comes in the shadow of fear. It was about celebrating a night when Suddapal was free, and the clear knowledge that such nights might be countably few. It was as intoxicating as the wine.

When she paused to find some water and meat and give her head a moment to clear, she saw Yardem standing at the entrance to the compound, his ears canted forward. Magistra Isadau stood before him, looking up, her arms folded. She didn’t need to hear the words to know what they were saying. She was gathering herself up, ready to go explain her decision to stay and dress Yardem down for interfering, when a voice speaking her name interrupted her.

Salan, Jurin’s son, stood before her. In the light from the torches, he looked older than he was. He held himself upright, his bearing almost military, and his clothes had the look of a uniform without actually being one.

“Magistra Cithrin,” he said again. His breath smelled of wine, and he spoke with the careful diction that came of consciously not slurring his words. “I hoped I might have a word with you.”

Oh, this can’t be good, Cithrin thought. But she only said, “Of course, Salan. How can I help you?”

The boy frowned. Cithrin felt her heart squeeze a little tighter with dread. It was such a pleasant evening, and a young man humiliating himself wasn’t going to improve it. If she had excused herself, maybe she could have avoided this for them both, but now it was too late.

“I know that I am a child to you. My …” He looked down, searching for a word. The nictitating membranes slid closed and open again. “My affection toward you isn’t something to be taken seriously. I understand that.”

“Salan—”

“I have volunteered to go with Karol Dannien and his company to Kiaria. I leave within the week. And I didn’t want to leave with you thinking of me as the idiot boy with the hopeless puppy love. It’s not how I want to be remembered. If I could choose to feel differently about you, I would. If I could choose not to embarrass you and myself, I would. I don’t mean to be laughable.”

“I haven’t laughed,” Cithrin said. “Credit me that much.”

“I … of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse. I only wanted …” He shook his head, then held out his clenched fist, knuckles up. It took Cithrin a moment to realize he was giving her something. She put out her hand, and he released his grip. A thin strand of silver snaked onto her palm, a tiny worked figure. She held the necklace up. The figure was a thin silver bird, its wings outstretched. Cithrin shook her head, about to refuse the gift, when the boy spoke again. “Captain Dannien says we aren’t to bring personal items with us. I was hoping you could hold this safe for me. Until the war’s over.”

Until the war’s over.

The Antean armies hadn’t crossed into Elassae. Inentai, at last word, hadn’t fallen. And still, it was a given that the war would come. And its end was so uncertain that until the war’s over could sound like forever. Salan’s black eyes met hers. If she laughed now, he would hate her. He would be right to.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll be pleased to.”

“Thank you, Magistra,” he said, with a small bow, then hesitated, turned, and walked stiffly away. Cithrin fastened the necklace, letting the small silver bird rest just below her collarbone. It was so light and fine, she could almost forget it was there. Almost.

The music and dancing went on, the wine and the beer. The night grew a few degrees cooler. Cithrin willed herself to enjoy it, to throw herself into the revelry and celebrate Halvill and Maha being young and stupid and making decisions that would shape the rest of their lives without so much as a moment’s consideration. Then she remembered a time not so many years ago when she’d lain down beside an ice-bound pond with an actor. If God hadn’t sent Marcus Wester at the right moment, she might have Sandr’s son on her hip right now, so perhaps she wasn’t in a position to pass judgment.

The revel ran on, and Cithrin drank and danced, but some of the joy had gone out of it. Given the Timzinae’s small need for sleep, it was quite possible that the music would go on until dawn drowned the torches, but it would have to do so without her. She sought out Halvill and Maha, gave them small presents of her own because custom required it, and then retreated to her own rooms. The sound of guitars and the smell of torch smoke wafted in through the open window, but more softly. She undid her dress stays, changed into the sleeping gown, but she didn’t take to bed. Not yet. The alcohol in her blood was fading, and with it the chance of sleep. She sat, looking into the candleflame. When the scratch came at her door, she realized she’d been waiting for it.

Isadau looked lovely. The silver of her dress set off the darkness of her scales. Her smile carried a gentleness that Cithrin had come to expect.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Magistra,” Cithrin replied. “I saw Yardem talking to you. I assume you’ve come to make the case that I should leave.”

“Less case and more plan,” Isadau said, sitting where Yardem had sat. “I’m not going to ask you to leave.”

“You’re going to tell me to?”

Isadau’s eyes went merry. “Do you think that would work? All I’ve seen of you suggests otherwise.”

“I don’t have a brilliant record for following the dictates of authority,” Cithrin said, laughing despite herself.

“Well, then. You came to me to learn how to build up a bank, and I’m not certain how much longer I will be doing that work.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve protected Komme’s interests as best I can. I have funneled what capital I could out of harm’s way. And as we move forward, I will follow the contracts and honor the deposits that I can. But this is not the holding company. This is my bank, and the power of money is not only that it makes more money.”

“I wouldn’t tell that to the holding company,” Cithrin said, but the joke fell flat.

“Money is the physical form of power. And the time is coming for that power to be expended,” Isadau said. “Coins are only objects until they’re used. Then they become something else. Food for the hungry. Passage for the desperate. It’s the magic that we do. We take a bit of metal and use it to remake the world in the shape we want.”

“To stop a war?”

“To avoid its worst excesses, yes,” Isadau said. “I have spent my life tending this bank. Building it up like a fortune. And now the time is coming for me to spend it. No one thinks that Antea will stop with Sarakal. Kiaria may stand, but Suddapal will fall. And I will bankrupt this branch saving as many people as I can from it. I will bribe whoever I can. I will suborn and corrupt and trade. I will take risks that have no rationale in the world of finance. Moral risks. They won’t save my city, but they will preserve some part of it. In the end, I doubt the branch will survive.”

“Or you.”

“In the end, I doubt I will survive,” Isadau said. “I won’t be a good teacher for you anymore. It will be time for you to go.”

Cithrin rose from her seat, looked out the window. The flaring torches were hardly brighter than the star-strewn sky.

“I thought you were saving my heart,” she said. “The part that hadn’t died yet, but was in danger. Isn’t that what Komme said?”

Isadau hesitated. Cithrin turned to look at her.

“It is.”

“You’re choosing to use your power for something besides profit,” Cithrin said. “I understand that there are things of value that aren’t priced. Or … no. I know that, but I don’t understand it. This project you’re taking on is what Komme sent me here to learn.”

“And so you won’t leave. Even if your life is in threat.”

“I’m not bent on dying. I’d prefer not to. But I won’t leave you here,” Cithrin said. And then, “It’s your own fault, you know. You gave me a plant.”

Isadau’s laughter was delight and despair mixed. She rose, taking Cithrin’s hands, and for a moment they embraced. The older woman smelled of cinnamon and smoke. Cithrin rested her cheek on Isadau’s shoulder. She could feel the woman weeping.

“I will tell Yardem I failed,” Isadau said. “Once he hears why, I think he’ll be pleased that I did.”

“It won’t make his work easier.”

“He’s flexible enough, I think. You are doing something dangerous and unnecessary and wild. I don’t know whether to thank you or dress you down.”

“Neither one will alter my position on it,” Cithrin said.

“I believe you.”

After Isadau left, Cithrin felt the first tendrils of sleep. It was as if she’d been waiting to say those words, and now that she had, her day could end. She curled under the blanket, one arm raised up as a pillow, and let her mind drift. Coins as bits of metal with the power to make the world the way you wanted it to be. Coins that become food for the hungry or robes for the powerful, but rarely both. It struck her that blades were also metal, also used to remake the world. In the murk of her sleep-soaked mind, something stirred. The half-formed thought that her coins could, perhaps, cut deeper if she could only find how.

A week later, the news came that Inentai had fallen.

Geder

If the siegecraft of Baltan Sorris is to be understood, it must be in the context of Drakkis Stormcrow, for General Sorris was a student of the ancient classic texts. The more common, and in my view mistaken, interpretation is that the early kings of Northcoast had catapults and siege engines capable of lofting stones or burning pitch so high into the air that all parts of a besieged city were under threat from them. What I have shown is that, instead, the instructions Sorris gave were an unconsidered artifact of more ancient wars in which the field of battle was not restricted to the plane of the earth, but included dragons, wyverns, and gryphons capable of attacking from the sky. While this image of Sorris as a hidebound follower of outdated precepts contradicts the traditional account of his military brilliance, I will, in the next section, make the case that it better explains his decisions in the latter half of his career, especially in the Third Siege of Porte Silena and the infamous Four Kings War.

Geder closed the book and sighed. It happened every few weeks. He would find some spare hour that could be carved away from the needs and responsibilities of the kingdom and retreat to his library. He remembered spending hours—days—lost in his books. There had been a time when exploring the speculative essays of history had been like the adventurer Dar Cinlama walking in the forgotten places of the world, discovering forgotten eras and stumbling upon insights that changed his understanding of history. It had brought him to the Righteous Servant, the Sinir Kushku, and the place of highest power in the world. But the price, apparently, was the joy he used to have and couldn’t find any longer. Basrahip derided all printed words as dead, and Geder found the position more and more persuasive. In all his books, there had been only a few mentions of the spider goddess. None at all of the fire years. Or of the oppression of the goddess and her followers by the dragons. Or their flight from the ancient lands that had become Birancour. The true history of the world was preserved in the temple at the edge of the Keshet, and so far as Geder could see, nowhere else. What evidence was there, after all, that Baltan Sorris had studied Drakkis Stormcrow? Or that Sorris had even existed, for that matter? The battles and struggles and intrigues of history might be nothing more than make-believe given dignity by print.

In that light, Geder’s personal library seemed empty. Not a field rich with truths to be uncovered, but a desert where if there were any truths, they were indistinguishable from lies. It was a conclusion he reached over and over again, forgetting every time, then going back and disappointing himself again. Perhaps it was time to find some other pursuit to distract him from the burdens of rulership.

Perhaps he could learn to play music.

“Lord Regent?”

“Yes, I know,” Geder said. “I’m coming.”

The chamber had been a ballroom once, before Geder had appropriated it. The tiers of benches that rose up on three walls had once been intended for men and women of nobility to take their rest while still seeing and being seen. Now Geder’s personal guard stood there, swords and bows at the ready. Where the wooden parquet that had supported some forgotten generation of dancers had splintered and warped, Geder had had black stone put in. The graceful lamps and candleholders he’d replaced with dark iron sconces and pitch-stinking torches. His own seat rose high above the floor, like a magistrate’s counter, only higher, wider, and grander. Basrahip’s station was across the way, where Geder could glance up from the prisoner and have the priest tell him whether the statements were lies or truth. He’d used it first to assure himself of the loyalty of his guards, and then of his subjects. The noble classes of Asterilhold were still being brought, one by one, through the chamber, and while the constant repetition of questions—Are you loyal to me? Are you plotting against the throne?—sometimes became tedious, the pleasure of catching out a liar never lost its charm.

Abden Shadra had been head of the one of the most powerful of the traditional families. His sons and daughters, nephews and nieces and cousins had controlled almost a third of the nation that had once been Sarakal. He knelt on the black floor without even the strength left to rise. His hair was white against his dark scales, his lip swollen. Bruises didn’t look like bruises on Timzinae. The blood pooling under their skin shoved the scales up and stretched them. Abden Shadra’s left arm looked almost like a sausage because of it. The rags that hung from his shoulders might have been fine robes once. They were certainly humbled now.

Geder leaned forward on his elbows, looking down at the man.

“You know who I am?” Geder asked.

The Timzinae’s gaze swam up and up until it found him. Even then, it seemed that he lost his train of thought, forgot the question and then remembered it. He licked his lips.

“Palliako,” he said.

“Yes, good,” Geder said. “Tell me about your part in the plot against my life.”

Abden Shadra swallowed, worked his mouth like he was trying to expel some foul taste from it. Even from where he sat, Geder could hear the dry clicking of tongue against teeth. The man’s eyes shifted to the left and then the right and then back again. Geder felt the stirrings of hope, of excitement.

“You started the war,” Abden Shadra said. “We didn’t attack you.”

“No. Before that,” Geder said. “Did you meet with Dawson Kalliam?”

“Never met him.”

Geder glanced up, and Basrahip nodded. It was true.

“Did you meet with his agents?”

“No.” True.

“Did you conspire to have me or Prince Aster killed?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“A great lot of your own people.” Geder didn’t bother looking at Basrahip for that one.

“Who in Sarakal? Who among the Timzinae?”

“I don’t know of anyone,” the man said. “You could talk to Silan Junnit. He had a reputation for caring about you people.” Geder glanced up. True. And interesting. He added a name to the list he had built. Silan Junnit. He’d have to see if that was one of the prisoners he’d taken. He’d had a few suggestions like this before, but more often than not, the person named was already dead. It was frustrating. The conspiracy always seemed on the edge of exposure, and then it would dance just out of reach. It never seemed to be the person he’d captured, but one they knew of or had heard about.

It frustrated him. And it frightened him more than a little.

“Will you swear to take no action against Antea, the Severed Throne, me, or Aster?”

“I will. If that’s what you want from me, I’ll do it.” Basrahip hesitated, shrugged, nodded. It was true. Geder’s eyes narrowed. This was always the hardest part, but he felt he was genuinely getting better at it.

“Would you mean it?”

“Yes.” Basrahip shook his head. No. He wouldn’t, and he knew he wouldn’t, and now Geder knew it too. It was as predictable as it was disappointing.

“Take him back to his cell,” Geder said. “Bring in the next one.”

Two guards stepped forward and hoisted Abden Shadra by his shoulders.

“No!” the Timzinae said. “I’ll swear whatever you want! I’ll do what you say, just don’t send me back there.”

Geder leaned forward.

“You,” he said coldly, “don’t get to lie to me. Take him back.”

The man’s cries echoed as they hauled him back. The great doors opened and then closed again. Two new guards hauled a woman’s form into the light. She was younger, her scales a glossy black. Her dress was rough canvas, and likely given to her in the prison. When they let her go, she sank to her knees, wrapping her arms around her chest. Geder checked his list.

“Sohen?” he asked. “Sohen Bais?”

The woman nodded, but the only sounds she made were sobs. Geder looked at Basrahip, but the priest neither nodded nor shook his head. In the absence of the living voice, there was nothing. A gesture was only a gesture, whatever the intent behind it.

“You have to answer,” Geder said. “You have to actually talk. Do you understand?”

The woman wailed. Geder felt a pang of guilt followed instantly by resentment at having been made to feel guilty. He pressed his thumb against his nose and considered calling the proceedings to an end for the day. He didn’t want to be here anymore. But once he started slacking off his duties, it would only get harder to pick them back up.

“Sohen,” he said, speaking as gently as he could manage. “Sohen. Listen to me. Listen to my voice. It’s going to be all right. It is. No one here wants to hurt you.”

She looked up. Tears ran from her eyes and mucus from her nose. Her mouth was set in a gape. Geder tried a smile, nodding encouragement. She closed her mouth and nodded back. He let his smile widen and felt a little better about himself.

“Good. You’re doing fine. No one here wants to hurt you. You just need to tell me the truth. Your name is Sohen Bais?”

Her voice was a creak. “It is.” Behind her, Basrahip nodded.

“See?” Geder said. “Just like that. You’re doing fine. Now. Do you know who I am?”

There was a feast that night, just like every other damn night of the season. One of Canl Daskellin’s daughters—Alisa—was to marry a young baron from Asterilhold. On the one hand, since he’d conquered Asterilhold, it would be better if the noble classes there were fully engaged with ingratiating themselves to Antea. On the other, it was exactly this sort of political marriage a few generations back that had given rise to the mixed bloodlines that had allowed Feldin Maas to conspire against King Simeon. It was strange how long ago that seemed. Geder sat at the high table with Aster and Lord Daskellin and his family looking out upon the assembled courtiers. The trees in the gardens had been draped with bright cloth. Lanterns of colored glass glowed all around them and scented the air with sweet oil and smoke. The slightest breeze set the trees to nodding to one another like old magistrates impressed with their own wisdom, while the men and women of the court gabbled to each other below them. Geder tapped his knife against his plate, not because he wanted anything. He only felt restless, and it made a pleasing sort of clink.

Sanna Daskellin sat across from her father, near enough that Geder could easily catch her eye, and she his. There had been an incident not long after he’d become Baron of Ebbingbaugh and before he’d been named Lord Regent when he’d been fairly sure that Sanna had been, if not wooing him, at least making it very plain that she was open to being wooed. Tonight, though, her face was a mask of politeness and decorum. Geder couldn’t tell if it was because her father was present or if her opinion of him had changed. She leaned forward a degree, her eyebrow rising in query, and Geder realized he’d been staring at her a bit. He shook his head and waved his hand.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just lost in the haze of it all. Running the empire does tend to consume all one’s spare thoughts.”

“And yet you manage it wonderfully,” Sanna said with a smile, so perhaps her view of him hadn’t entirely shifted. Canl Daskellin shifted nearer as the servants refiled his wineglass.

“The fighting season is nearly at an end,” he said. “Summer’s high now, but autumn’s coming. All these leaves will be losing their green before you know it.”

“I suppose that’s so,” Geder said.

“Still,” Daskellin said, “we’ve done better than anyone expected. All of Asterilhold conquered one year, all of Sarakal the next? I don’t think anyone will dare cross the Severed Throne now. You’ve done a brilliant job of it. Brilliant.”

Geder smiled, but he didn’t particularly mean it. He heard the unspoken argument. Autumn would come. The army would have to be brought home and the disband called. The veterans would have to return to their lands and work. The war would have to end. Mecilli had been making the same argument in less oblique terms, and Geder didn’t find Daskellin’s softer approach any more endearing.

“The work’s not done,” Geder said. “Whichever group is behind all this, they’ve evaded me so far, but they can’t hide forever.”

A young man in the colors of House Daskellin fluttered by and Geder’s plate seemed to sprout a pink ham steak, two large bites already taken out where his official taster had already sampled it. There had been a time when Geder had been able to eat his own food without someone hovering over it. Maybe there would be again, someday. He cut a bite free and popped it into his mouth. At least it tasted good.

“Have you considered, my lord,” Daskellin said, his words careful as a cat walking along the top of a wall, “that there might not be a Timzinae conspiracy?”

Geder put down his knife.

“Have you forgotten how I came to be here? One of our own joined with King Lechan of Asterilhold to kill Aster and his father and take the throne. A year after that, my own patron tried to open my side with a knife. He actually cut Basrahip. This court has been so rotten with schemes and lies and covert plans, it’s amazing we didn’t all slaughter each other and hand the throne to the first idiot to wander across the border.”

“Of course no one disputes—”

“Everybody knows Dawson Kalliam was suborned by Timzinae,” Geder said, “and I am close to finding them. Very close. Almost every third person I’ve questioned from the traditional families knows someone who they say might have been involved. Our mistake was thinking we could catch them easily. The ones who escaped when Sarakal fell were the ones who knew the war was coming. The ones who knew there was a reason for it.”

Daskellin’s smile had wilted a bit, but it hadn’t vanished. He lifted a single finger, his skin smooth but as dark as a Timzinae’s.

“I’d thought the reason we’d crossed into Sarakal was to prove the empire wasn’t weak, despite all we’d been through. I would have thought we’d made that clear.”

“By letting our enemies escape?” Geder asked.

“Would my lord care for some of these greens?” Sanna asked, leaning in toward them. Her smile had a nervous edge. “The cooks used garlic and oil and salt, and the flavor is amazing.”

“You’ll have to send them to my taster,” Geder said. “My point—” The servant placed a cup of cool water beside his plate. “My point is that if we stop now, call Ternigan back, give him a triumph, and call the disband, the men who started this will still be out there. And everyone who knows of them will see that. Yes, I’ve heard Mecilli’s arguments, and yes, it will mean some sacrifice. But consider what happens if we’re too timid. We’ll see all the chaos and war we’ve suffered a hundred times over.”

“A hundred more years like these, and we’ll have conquered the stars,” Daskellin said, but Geder didn’t find the joke funny or the flattery convincing.

“We have to press on,” Geder said. “I know winter campaigns aren’t well thought of, but Elassae’s fairly warm, and if Ternigan does as well between now and next spring as he’s done until now, the whole problem will be solved by first thaw.”

“I understand,” Daskellin said. “My only concern is that the roaches may—”

Aster made a false cough that meant he wanted to speak. The boy was so quiet that it was easy to forget that he was there with them. Geder turned to him, even though it meant putting his back to Daskellin.

“If Elassae wants to avoid war, they can,” the boy said sweetly. “All they’d need to do is hand over the conspirators. And if they won’t do that, then we can’t really pretend they haven’t chosen sides.”

Geder felt objections boiling up, but he closed his lips against them. Talking to Aster wasn’t like sitting with Emming or Daskellin. Or even Jorey Kalliam. Aster would be king when he was old enough. The Severed Throne was his, and Geder was only protecting it for him. And Aster watched Geder as he’d watched King Simeon. He studied with his tutors and with Minister Basrahip, and his young mind, while not yet fully formed, was engaged and lively. Already, the shape of his face had changed from the roundness it had had. The first planes and angles were in his cheeks, showing what he would be when he’d grown to manhood. The same was true of his words. Letting him have his voice in the decisions of the crown wasn’t handing him live steel. Geder would still sign the commands. Hearing the boy out was the least he could do.

“So you think we shouldn’t press on?” he said.

“I think giving them the chance to avoid war would be the kind and honorable thing.”

“I agree with the prince,” Daskellin said. “If there is a way to end this gracefully and turn back to the business of rebuilding the kingdom, we should.”

Geder folded his hands together. “I will put together a proclamation for Ternigan to deliver before he comes to any more battles. If they turn over the conspirators—all the conspirators—we’ll show mercy. Agreed?”

“I do,” Aster said. “Though honestly, I can’t think they’ll take it. They’re Timzinae. It’s not as if they were people.”

Marcus

The dream came again. After so many months away, it was like encountering an old enemy. Marcus knew, even as it began, as the normal meaningless patterns of his sleeping mind began to change to the terrible and familiar, that it wasn’t real. Perhaps it should have helped.

Alys and Merian were there, with him. He couldn’t see their faces anymore. They had been lost from memory years ago, but the sense of their physical presence was unmistakable. His wife. Their daughter. The flood of love and joy filled him against his will. He didn’t want it, but it came. The sense of relief was like an assault, because he knew what would follow it.

The crackling of fire. Merian was screaming. Marcus ran, his legs refusing him. Tree branches held him back, or men’s arms, or the thickened air itself. He panted and gasped, he willed himself forward even as he knew that he was already years too late. The green scabbard bounced against his back, the poison of the blade making him stumble. Merian’s shrieks were like a cat being strangled. Even though he couldn’t reach her, he could feel her breath against his ear.

He was in the fire, cradling her. She was still in his arms, and he thought—as he always did in this part—that she was safe. That he’d saved her. This time, he’d saved her, and when he woke, she would be alive because of it. And then he understood. The grief was wider than oceans. He screamed out for a vengeance that he’d taken almost a decade before.

The burned child in his arms was Merian, but it was also Cithrin. He didn’t put her down, but in the logic of dreams he was also drawing the venomed blade. He felt himself running, and this time the speed was like falling. He would take his revenge.

He woke up trying to bring the blade down.

The stars of the Keshet glowed above him, a vast and milky horde. He muttered an obscenity and rolled to his side. His body ached like someone had beaten him, but at least he wasn’t dreaming anymore. Long experience had taught him that he could. If he closed his eyes again now, it would all begin again from the start. He’d known men with fevers that let them be for months or even years at a time, and then descended again, pulling them into delirium and illness for weeks. This wasn’t so different. Except that it was his, so he had to suffer it.

He sat up, yawned. The sky was clear, but the air smelled like rain. There would be a storm by midday. They’d stop and try to gather some drinking water from it. Not that they needed it. The dragon’s road they were following would meet another in a day or so, and there’d be a few semipermanent buildings there. A trader, a well, a place to sleep with a roof. The height of civilization.

“You’re awake,” Kit said. He was sitting by the dim embers of the last night’s cookfire, the blanket from his bedroll over his shoulders. His expression in the starlight seemed distant. Maybe sad.

“I guess that makes it my watch,” Marcus said.

“If you’d like,” the old actor said, shrugging.

“Doesn’t make sense both of us staying awake.”

“I find myself needing less sleep,” Kit said.

“You find yourself sleeping less than you need to,” Marcus said. “Not the same.”

“I suppose that’s true. Good night, then.”

Kit shifted from sitting down to a curled heap on the ground without actually seeming to move very much. Marcus stood, stretched, tried to decide whether he needed to piss. The mule woke enough to flick a wide ear, then went back to ignoring the men. Near the southern horizon, a plume of smoke stood dark against the dark sky, so dim and subtle that Marcus could only see it in the corner of his eye. A caravan or one of the nomadic cities. They’d have news, perhaps. They’d have something more convincing to eat than the two-days-dead rabbit that was his planned breakfast. Under other circumstances, he’d have discussed the possibility with Kit, come to an agreement. But he didn’t want to spend the time, and Kit didn’t care.

Kit didn’t care about much of anything, it seemed.

“You’re not sleeping,” Marcus said.

“I’m not.”

“Any particular reason for that?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Only I close my eyes, and then they seem to open again.”

“Well, a fine pair we are.”

Kit rose, taking his old position as if he’d never lain down. Marcus scratched at his shoulder. The place where the sword rode against him had a strange burned feel, and every few days a layer of grey skin would flake off. In truth, they were making good progress. They were two men accustomed to travel, carrying only what they needed and perhaps a bit less. If one of them grew sick or stepped on a snake, it would be a bad day, but they were going quickly. They’d be out of the Keshet and into Elassae well before the season turned. He was looking forward to it, and he wasn’t.

“I was a fool,” Kit said. “I feel I’ve wasted my life.”

“If you feel like that, you probably are a fool,” Marcus said.

“I thought of myself as wise,” Kit said. “I carried the secrets of the world with me like a bag of pretty stones. I knew of the goddess, which was a secret held by only a few. And I knew her madness. Her weakness. Her confusion of certainty and truth. And for that I was singular. The only man in the world who saw it all for what it was. I am astounded I could carry that arrogance so long and not notice the burden.”

“Arrogance doesn’t weigh much,” Marcus said. “No heft to it.”

Kit chuckled. “I suppose not. Still, I am ashamed.”

“You should get over that,” Marcus said.

“I appreciate that,” Kit said, “but I think you don’t understand.”

“Might. You thought you were some kind of God-touched cunning man because you had your spider tricks, only it turned out you were more like the rest of us than not. I was the greatest general in an age, determining who sat what throne and shaping the world with my will and a few thousand sharp blades. Only it turned out we were both men, and we both made mistakes. Yours set us off through some of the least pleasant terrain I’ve ever had the poor fortune to walk through and ended with me trying to hack a hunk of stone to death with a magic sword. Mine ended with a couple graves and a lot of bad dreams.”

Kit was silent for a moment. Something scuttled through the grass off to his right, but it didn’t sound big enough that Marcus cared.

“I believe I see your point, and I apologize. I didn’t intend to make light of your loss.”

“You don’t see my point, then. My loss doesn’t matter. Alys. Merian. They don’t care that I failed them. They haven’t cared for a long time now. I care, but I can’t do anything. I carry it because it’s mine. You lived your life either in service to or revolt against something that turns out not to be real. I can see that’s embarrassing.”

“It’s more than that,” Kit said. “It leaves me unsure whether my life has had any meaning at all.”

“While you figure that out, you’ll need to get some rest. And start eating enough. And stop trying to take half of my watch along with yours. We have a job to do, and you need to be in a condition to do it.”

“I’m the one that brought you the job,” Kit said. “You recall, don’t you? You were the chosen one because I chose you. And if I was wrong …”

“It doesn’t matter where the job came from,” Marcus said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s something we can do. It’s the job. And you only get to pity yourself and sulk when it doesn’t get in the way of it.”

“And you feel it’s begun to?”

“Yes,” Marcus said. And then, “This is why you picked me, you know. Apart from needing someone to haul this damned uncomfortable hunk of metal, you knew at some point you might fall down and not want to get back up. I’m here to kick your ass.”

“Your job.”

“Part of it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Kit said. “Thank you, Marcus.”

“Anytime, Kit. I’m pleased I can help. Now, honestly? Go the hell to sleep.”

The Keshet in the falling days of summer had a severe kind of beauty. The white morning sky carried shades of yellow and pink. The blue of midday served as backdrop for towering clouds that reached up a hundred times higher than mountains, white as sunlight at the top and angry grey blue at the base. At the day’s end, the slow sun would seem to linger on the horizon, red and swollen. The moon waxed and then waned. Before it waxed full again, they would be in Elassae. In Suddapal.

By choice, they met few other travelers. Sometimes Kit would spend the day singing, and his years on the boards gave his voice a range from barrel-deep to sweetly high, depending upon the song. Marcus didn’t object. Sometimes he even joined his voice with Kit’s. But beneath that, he felt himself growing narrow. Sharp. Focused. The anticipation was like being on a hunt, but it lasted for weeks. He was preparing himself. It was a sensation he’d had before, once, and it brought the nightmares.

There was no single moment when the western edge of the Keshet became the eastern reaches of Suddapal. No garrison marked the border, no tax man squatted by the side of the road. The oases and crossroads only became a little larger, a little more permanent, until at last they were villages. The dragon’s road became better traveled, and then thick. The flood of war refugees was mostly Timzinae, but Jasuru and Tralgu and Firstblood families were among them in numbers enough that Marcus and Kit could fold themselves in among them unremarked.

They approached the fivefold city from the east, passing through farmlands and pastures Marcus had never seen. The commons were so thick with tents that it was as if new towns were forming within the city, and men stood in lines at the larger houses, negotiating hospitality from the locals or else begging it. Everywhere, the word was that Antea’s army was on the march, that they would be in Suddapal very, very soon.

Displacement was a part of war, and Marcus had lived his life around it. It was a tissue of misery, fear, and uncertainty. Children would be sleeping hungry and in the streets tonight and tomorrow and likely for months if not years to come, provided nothing worse happened.

“We can go to Ela and Epetchi,” Kit said. It took Marcus a moment to place the names as belonging to the café owners they’d stayed with before leaving for Lyoneia. “They’ll take us in if they can.”

“You should stay with them for a few days,” Marcus agreed.

Kit shot a glance at him, and Marcus shrugged. There wasn’t anything more to say. They both understood why he’d chosen Suddapal. When they reached the café, it was already full to the top with refugees, but they found room for Kitap. And they knew the way to the branch of the Medean bank. It was in the western end of the cities, and a way inland. Marcus thanked them, bought a bowl of charred mutton with a few coins Kit gave him, and walked out into the city.

For months, he’d traveled with Kit. In the unfamiliar jungles of deep Lyoneia and the unforgiving mountains and planes of the Keshet, over the Inner Sea and back. The sense of being alone again, even on the busy streets and crowded commons of the city, surprised him and left him comforted. He wondered how much he’d been worried about carrying Kit and keeping him from despair. He wouldn’t have said he was much concerned, except that now he felt relieved in his isolation. Or maybe it was only that he now didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t hunting.

Yardem Hane was one of the best fighters Marcus had ever known, and the acuity of the Tralgu’s great, mobile ears had saved them from ambush more than once. Marcus’s advantage was that he knew his old companion as well as he was known by him, and Yardem didn’t know he’d come. He would only have one opportunity.

The compound of the Medean bank in Suddapal was a wide, low group of buildings around a vast yard. It looked more like a small, self-contained village than a bank. The streets were wide, which was good in that he could get a clear line of sight without coming too near the place, and bad in that there wasn’t cover enough to safely move in close. He found a place in the shadows of an alley and sat patiently, his face hidden and his shoulders sloped in dejection. Another doomed wanderer in a city sick with them. He waited. He watched. He noted the rhythms of the compound and its people. For a large place, it was well watched. He needed to wait until Yardem stepped out.

Or until everyone else did.

Three days later was Tenthday. The population of the city shed their shoes and marched together through the streets to the temples. Marcus watched them come out. Among the Timzinae guardsmen, Enen the Kurtadam stood out. But not so much as Cithrin. Marcus felt the sight of her like a blow. She looked taller. No, that wasn’t right. Not taller, but older. Her pale hair was pulled back and her green velvet gown was well cut without being boastful. She was walking arm in arm with an older Timzinae woman, her expression sharp with concentration. Seeing her from the distance of the alley was dreamlike and strange. The last time he’d been this near to her, she’d been leaving for Carse and telling him that taking him to Northcoast would be a mistake. If he’d fought against that, insisted that he stay with her, how different the world might be. He forced himself to look down for fear his gaze would draw hers. But she was here. She was well enough, it seemed. That was as it should be. But it didn’t change what he needed to do.

Yardem wasn’t among the temple-bound throng. He’d stayed back, then, to guard the compound. Marcus forced himself to wait, but the tension growing in his back and legs made it difficult. The time had come. When the last of the household had turned the farthest corner, Marcus counted his breaths to a hundred, then did it again, then stood. The sword hung heavy across his back. He crossed the wide road to the compound’s gate, then walked down the wall until he found a place low enough to vault it.

He found Yardem Hane on a low porch, a book in his massive hands and his ears canted forward. Marcus pulled the blade clear of its scabbard, keeping a finger against the steel so that it would not ring. The angle of his approach kept the Tralgu’s wide back toward him. He reached the edge of the porch in silence. A fast lunge would be all it took. Even a shallow cut, and the sword’s venom would do the rest.

Marcus put the sole of his foot against the bare dirt and twisted. Yardem’s ears swiveled back at the sound, but he didn’t look up.

“Sir,” he said.

“You know why I’m here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You betrayed my trust.”

Slowly, carefully, being certain no movement could be mistaken for an attack, Yardem placed a twig between the book’s pages and let them close.

“I did.”

“How long were you planning to let me rot in that little prison?”

Yardem put a hand to either side and slowly lifted himself up to standing. He was tall, even for a Tralgu. He had the old sword at his side, but his fingers didn’t touch its hilt. His earrings jingled.

“Until Cithrin came back, sir.”

“And if she hadn’t?”

“I’d have given myself a fair head start,” Yardem said. “All respect, sir. You were going to loot her bank and hire a company to march into the middle of someone else’s civil war.”

“What of it?”

“It was a bad idea.”

Marcus tightened his grip on the blade, his mouth bending into a scowl. For three long breaths together, they stood motionless. He felt the rage in his breast reach its high-water mark and then recede.

He pressed his lips together, and then lowered the blade.

“Fair point,” he said. “So. Where do we stand?”

“Pyk Usterhall’s running the Porte Oliva branch. Cithrin’s agreed with Komme Medean to a year’s apprenticeship with Magistra Isadau, and then a year back in Porte Oliva. Only it’s not certain we’ll make the full year here. Antea’s expected to invade at any moment. They’ve sent runners to say if we hand over the people responsible for the coup in Camnipol last year, they’ll leave, but no one seems to know who that would be. We’ve sent most of the bank’s capital out of the city, but the local magistra’s dedicated to staying and helping people get out of harm’s way for as long as she can. Cithrin’s apparently decided to do the same. And Roach just got married, only we’re calling him Halvill now.”

“Halvill?”

“His name.”

“Ah.”

“You, sir?”

“Well, the war’s actually being driven by a set of mad priests who have power over truth and lies. The plan was to kill the spider goddess they worship and take away their power, only it turns out she’s a figment of their collective imagination. Kit used to be one of them, but he turned apostate. He’s at a café down by the port having what’s left of his faith collapse around him.”

“I see.”

“Oh,” Marcus said, holding up the blade. “Magic sword.”

“Full year.”

“Has been,” Marcus said. Then, “It’s good to be back, though.”

“Happy to have you, sir.”

Cithrin

There are two books on my bedside table,” Isadau said. Months of close contact let Cithrin see her anxiety. The others—even Yardem—almost certainly didn’t.

“Probably,” Kit said. “Certainly you believe there are.”

“I also have a lamp there.”

“No, Magistra,” the old actor said. “You do not.”

Isadau sat back in her chair. Her smile might almost have been amused, but her inner eyelids were fluttering madly.

It was profoundly strange. Cithrin had walked out on the Tenthday routine, her mind occupied with thoughts of the bank and the war, Isadau’s network for refugees of the old conflict and the coming one, and her own growing sense of dread. When she came back, Captain Wester was sitting in the courtyard and Master Kit was walking in from the street. She’d heard of people who’d gotten fevers and lost their minds in them. She had to think it felt similar. Isadau didn’t seem to be put off her stride, but for her these were two men loosely associated with the bank who’d arrived much as a courier might. For Cithrin, they were two people she’d trusted and relied on who had left her without a word and arrived without a warning. She wanted to run to them both and hug them and yell at them and make sure they would never go away again, and so instead she fell into a politeness and distance that she hated even as she employed it.

They gathered in a private courtyard with a small fountain and ivy growing up three of the four walls. It was cool and beautiful, and the tiny clapping hands of the ivy’s leaves meshed with the muttering of water to make eavesdropping almost impossible. Marcus and Yardem shared a bench, while Master Kit perched on the fountain’s edge. Cithrin sat in a chair beside Isadau. A servant brought a small wooden table and filled it with cups of cool water and bowls of cut apples. To anyone in the household, it would have seemed nothing more than another meeting among hundreds where the two magistras spoke about the private doings of the bank.

Captain Wester’s absence hadn’t been kind to him. He was thinner than she’d ever seen him, his cheeks gaunt and his neck so ropy that she could trace the individual muscles and tendons. Master Kit also looked worn down by the road, but with him it almost seemed like a shedding of old clothes. His eyes were brighter, his smile just as open and pleasant, and the darkness of his skin a testament to weeks out of doors. He had none of the greyness that dulled Marcus’s skin, and his eyes hadn’t taken the same slight tint of yellow.

And then, just as Cithrin began to feel she had her balance back, Master Kit had pricked his thumb with Yardem’s dagger and tiny black spiders had come out.

“And if you were to speak to me,” Isadau said.

“I would be very difficult to disbelieve,” Master Kit said. “Even those things which you had evidence against, you would eventually find some way to justify.”

“Even if it was absurd?”

Master Kit’s smile was melancholic.

“I have tried to dedicate my life to the discovery of the world as it truly is,” he said, “and even knowing what I knew, it seems I have been unable to avoid believing absurdities. I believe I could convince you of anything.”

Yardem made a low sound in his throat, part growl and part chuckle. Master Kit’s glance was a question.

“Just recalling all our philosophical debates,” Yardem said. “You could have won all of them if you’d cared to.”

“I hope I chose my words carefully enough to respect the beliefs I did not share.”

“All the same,” Isadau said, “you are an abomination.”

Cithrin scowled and began to object, but Kit beat her to it.

“Certainly I agree that I have a potential for evil that those unlike me do not. And I am afraid that this present violence is the fruit that grew from that bloom.”

“What is it they want?” Yardem asked, his voice a low rumble. “The other ones.”

“I believe they want to bring the world together under the banners of the goddess,” Kit said. “To place everything within her and make it part of her flesh. Before I fell from grace, I was told that we were waiting for a sign, and when that sign came we would return to the nations of humanity, stand against the forces of the dragon, and free the world at last from lies and deception.”

“By spreading their story,” Marcus said.

“Until there are no other stories,” Kit finished. “By ignoring or destroying anything that failed to match with the certainties of the goddess who is immune from lies.”

Magistra Isadau sat forward, her head sinking into her hands.

“Geder was that sign,” Cithrin said.

“In a sense, yes,” Master Kit said. “Though if it had not been him now, I suspect it would have been another at another time. I suspect signs are fairly easy to see for one dedicated to seeing them. And if a high priest believed that he had seen the hand of the goddess at work in the world, he would only need to say it, and it would become as true as anything else. As certain, at least. I don’t know the man who has taken the high priest’s place.”

“Basrahip,” Cithrin said. “His name’s Basrahip.”

“I assume he was initiated after I left,” Kit said. “But what he believes, he believes sincerely. And all the other priests will also believe. And then anyone who listens to their voices. And then … everyone.”

“Explains some things,” Yardem said.

Marcus turned to the Tralgu. “Explains what, for instance?”

“Why the Anteans haven’t been sent back with their tails between their legs,” Yardem said. “They’re overreaching badly, except that they keep winning. They’ve found a way to use this on the field. Give false reports to the enemy or some such.”

“Not to mention all the rumors about Geder’s strange powers,” Cithrin said. “All that about how he speaks with the dead and the fallen warriors rise up to fight alongside him. It’s not the man I met. Easier to think that’s one of those tales the priests convince everyone of than that it’s actually true.”

“And right now,” Magistra Isadau said through her fingers, “at this moment, the only people in the world who understand what this war is and what it means are sitting in this garden.”

“Yes,” Marcus said.

“You,” Isadau said, turning to Master Kit. “How do we stop this?”

“I don’t know,” Kit said.

Isadau nodded. The nictiting membranes closed over her eyes.

“Komme has to be told,” she said. “Oh, God. I have a very long letter to write, don’t I?”

For the rest of the day, Cithrin tried to go about her usual routine, but it all seemed false as rehearsing a play. There were contracts to review, but the armies of Antea were on the roads already, carrying the false goddess’s banners. The histories of the bank hadn’t quite all been read through, but Marcus and Master Kit had come and neither were quite the men she’d thought they were. Though that was more the case with Kit than Captain Wester. She tried sleeping, but the late summer sun defied her. She tried working, but her mind escaped its leash. She wanted to be back in Porte Oliva or Carse, someplace where she understood the system of the world. Suddapal, with its echoes of Vanai and Camnipol, was too complicated. Or if it wasn’t the city, she had become too complicated for it.

Master Kit and Captain Wester joined the family at dinner, and anything else would have seemed strange. Kit regaled the table with stories from his years on the road, and Cithrin watched as people fell under the benign and compassionate spell of his voice. It was that same magic that had brought Sarakal into ruins. And Vanai. Only no, Vanai had burned before Geder’s discovery of the temple. That atrocity, at least, hadn’t been driven by the things in Master Kit’s blood.

She’d hoped to find Marcus alone after the meal, to sit with him. Breathe the same air. She felt that she had a thousand questions for him, only she didn’t know what any of them were. In any case, Marcus went to his room claiming exhaustion almost before the last plate of beef found its way to the table. Cithrin sat alone in the crowd as eating gave way to music and talk. The only one who seemed equally distracted was Isadau. When Master Kit withdrew from the hall, Isadau didn’t follow him. So Cithrin did.

The old actor was sitting alone in one of the smaller rooms, a wool blanket draped over his shoulders, when Cithrin came in.

“Kit,” she said.

“Ah, Magistra Cithrin,” Kit said, shifting on his bench to make room for her. “Have I mentioned how pleased I am to find you doing so well? It’s a long way from the last caravan out of Vanai.”

“I don’t know,” she said, sitting. “Seems like the same place to me, almost.”

“Yes, I suppose I see that,” he said.

“Are you … are you really you?” she asked. “I mean … I don’t know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” he said. “I carried a secret with me for many years, and now it’s uncovered. It must change how you see me, but I feel like the same man I always have been. My affection for you is what it was. My fears for the future haven’t changed. I feel more threatened, I suppose. But that may only be truth. When your friend Isadau said I was an abomination—”

“She didn’t mean it,” Cithrin said.

“She did, Cithrin. She very much did. And I think I understand why.”

A cricket took up its song, and then another. The chirping was thinner than it had been at midsummer. Fewer insects and a slower song.

“Marcus left when I was gone away to Camnipol.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “That must have been hard for you, his disappearing that way.”

“I was fine,” Cithrin said. Then, “God, you know that was a lie, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Kit said. “But it’s one that speaks well of you both.”

“Having him back … just back. It’s like Magister Imaniel popping up out of the grave and coming to the dinner table. Magister Imaniel or else …”

“Or else your father?”

“I didn’t know my father,” Cithrin said.

“Ah yes. I remember that,” Kit said. They were silent for a time.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Kit said.

“Basrahip. The priests. If they were looking for something, what would it be?”

“What do you mean, looking for?”

“Sending out hunting parties. Looking in the empty places in the world.”

“Well,” Kit said, then took a long, deep breath, giving himself time to think. “I think we have established that I may not have perfect insight into the workings of the priesthood. But I would think they were looking for other remnants of the dragons’ power. Something like the Timzinae or the sword that Marcus and I recovered. Are they? Looking, I mean.”

“I think so,” Cithrin said. “We’ve been getting reports from someone in Camnipol. We aren’t sure who. But one of the things he said was that there were expeditions going out. And one of them is being led by a Dartinae man I almost worked with in Porte Oliva. He gave me a dragon’s tooth.”

“Did he really?” Master Kit asked.

“I think he did,” Cithrin said. “I suppose it could be a fake.”

“I wonder …” Kit said.

“I could show it to you.”

“What? Oh, thank you, but no. I was remembering something Marcus said about men like me being driven into hiding once. A very long time ago. If my former companions are searching for something, I imagine it’s because they want to possess it or destroy it. Either way … What do we know about this man in Camnipol?”

“Almost nothing,” Cithrin said. “If Isadau doesn’t object, I can show you the reports.”

“I would very much like that.”

Cithrin felt a thickness in her throat, a sudden welling up of sorrow. Master Kit’s brows furrowed and he took her hand. Cithrin shook her head until she could find her voice. When she did speak, the words were thick.

“Now that he’s started this, he’s not going to stay,” she said. “Is he?”

Comprehension washed over Master Kit’s face. He looked down.

“I expect Captain Wester will remain here to protect the compound as best he can until the city’s fallen. Beyond that, I don’t know,” he said, and then chuckled ruefully. “In truth, Cithrin, these days I feel I don’t know anything.”

The armies of Antea arrived in the morning unopposed. It was understood that the fighting would be in Kiaria, where the soldiers had gone. Even a token resistance to the invaders in Suddapal would have meant a few dozen corpses and nothing more. They didn’t even try. The morning sun slanted down over the roofs and tent-thick commons. The Antean carts rolled through the streets, and soldiers marched behind them. Timzinae refugees who had left their homes behind to escape this same army sat quietly at the sides of the roads. Cithrin stood by the compound’s wall and watched. After so long, the mass of Firstblood faces seemed wrong. Out of place.

“Don’t stare, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Someone might take offense.”

“And what if they do?”

Marcus answered. His voice was tired.

“There’s still going to be a sack. If we’re lucky, it’ll be a short one, and centered someplace else.”

“What?” Cithrin said. “The soldiers just loot the place? Go through like bandits and take what they want?”

“If we’re lucky,” Marcus said again.

“We’ll stand against them,” Cithrin said.

“We’ll take everything of value in the compound,” Marcus said, “put it in the yard here, bar the doors, guard the windows, and hope for the best. This is going to be a bad night.”

He was right. It was. Through all the long hours of the night, Cithrin sat with Isadau in the relative safety of her office, reading by a small brass lamp, and remembering none of the words. The guards—Yardem, Enen, Marcus, and even Master Kit included—kept watch. Once, near midnight, voices came from the streets, a mad whooping followed by screams and then the sounds of something large and possibly wooden being broken. Then near dawn, the unmistakable sound of blades. Cithrin felt fear and fatigue grinding in her belly. She wanted badly to be drunk. Even if the worst came, at least she’d be insensible.

The morning air stank of smoke. Plumes of it rose from near the water, and Master Kit watched them with an expression so closed it frightened her. She remembered hearing that he had friends in the city. Their houses might be fueling those fires. Or their bodies.

Isadau stepped into her compound to survey the damage. Half of what they’d left out had been taken, and the other half destroyed. She lifted the remains of a lacquered box, and then let the pieces fall from her hands. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but otherwise her expression could have been carved from stone. This was more than her bank. It was her family’s home. It was her city. That she’d known this would come didn’t seem to pull the blow. She found Marcus and Yardem speaking with Jurin. Marcus nodded in salute. The gesture was familiar, and Cithrin felt herself clinging to it.

“Could have been much worse,” he said. “It was a near thing, but we didn’t lose anyone. And the Anteans are all falling back. Worst may be over.” Cithrin coughed out a mirthless laugh and Marcus nodded as if agreeing with her. In the street, someone was wailing. “Likely, they’ll send an order. The bank’s powerful enough they’ll want someone at the naming of the new protector.”

“Isadau?” Cithrin asked.

“It’s who I’d chose,” Marcus said.

“I’ll go with her.”

Marcus frowned and Yardem’s ears went forward, but neither of them made an objection.

“Come back when it’s done,” was all that Marcus said.

Cithrin went back to her rooms and changed into a formal dress and put up her hair. The city might be conquered, but the Medean bank was more than a city; it was the world. She would not pretend to be humbled. When she was done, she touched her lips and cheeks with rouge, vomited into the chamberpot, and applied the rouge again. The cut of the collar didn’t call for a necklace, but she put one on anyway: the silver bird in flight that Salan had given her. No one else might know the defiance it signified, but she would. When the order came, carried by a sneering Firstblood in Antean uniform, she accepted it on Isadau’s behalf. It was, after all, addressed to the magistra of the branch, and technically she fit the description. They were to come to the central square of the third city at noon. Lord Marshal Ternigan would accept their formal surrender of the city and introduce the new protector of Suddapal. Also every household was to surrender any weaned children younger than five against the good conduct of the city. There would be no exceptions made. Any children not turned over to the protector’s men would be killed without question.

Half an hour before the time came, Isadau let Cithrin guide her out to the street. The magistra wore ragged grey mourning robes and her eyes seemed empty. Shocked. When they passed the temple, a vast banner the red of blood hung from its roof. The eightfold sigil of the goddess looked out from its center like an unblinking eye, the symbol of nothingness. And below it, the body of the cunning man and priest that Cithrin and Yardem had snickered at from the pews. Terrible things had been done to him.

“She doesn’t even exist,” Isadau said, her voice quiet and brittle.

“She doesn’t need to,” Cithrin said.

Clara

When Clara’s only work had been the running of her household, it had still been enough to fill most days and even bring some occasional worries to bed. When things were well—and they were well more often than not—Dawson and the children were utterly unaware of the mechanisms and habits that kept the shoes cleaned and the food brought from the kitchen. If she asked Dawson to please keep his hunting dogs out of the servants’ quarters, he saw only her somewhat trivial focus. She didn’t tell him that one of the maids had been mauled as a girl and broke into sweats whenever the animals trotted through. Dawson would have told her to get a different maid, but this one had been the best at polishing the silver, and accommodations had to be made whether Dawson knew of them or not.

Her plan of battle was simple enough. Find competent, trustworthy servants, treat them with respect, and let them do their work. Listen when spoken to. Remember everybody’s name and something about the peculiarities of their lives. Forgive any mistake once, and none twice.

In the long, subterranean struggles between the women of the court, she held her own. Someone else might have a more fashionable tailor or hairdresser in any given season, lured away by promises and bribes, but Clara’s was always perfectly respectable, and they didn’t leave her in times of difficulty. As compared with some who thought training servants meant alternating between throwing fits and showering them with praise. She couldn’t count the number of ladies of the court who, one time and another, had managed to throw their own houses and lives into chaos by losing the service of their more competent staff.

And running a household, she supposed, was not so unlike running an empire.

As the long days of summer began to grow short again, she found herself invited to more informal gatherings. Women who had pretended not to know her began smiling or nodding to her when she walked through the more affluent streets of the city. Few went so far as to speak, but some did. The gossip around her shifted from the balls and feasts at the season’s opening, and turned toward the preparations for its end. Clara smiled and laughed and wished people the best in ways that made it clear she didn’t care for them. She fell into the patterns of the woman she’d been for most of her life, and it felt like wearing a mask at a street carnival.

Behind it, she was cataloging everything she heard. Of Geder Palliako’s inner court, Daskellin was far and away the best political mind. His daughter, who had been putting herself in compromising situations with Palliako before he’d been named Lord Regent, had fallen back into propriety. So perhaps Daskellin had gained a better insight into the kind of man Palliako was. Emming was a blowhard who played the gadfly on trivial matters and followed anyone more powerful than he was when the issue had weight. Mecilli was an honest man with a reputation for caution and tradition that most reminded Clara of Dawson. The two would have been friends, except that Mecilli had spoken out against dueling and Dawson had decided the man was a coward. Noyel Flor wasn’t dim, but he was the third generation of his family to be Protector of Sevenpol, and in everything he considered what was best for his city first and the empire as a whole after. Lord Skestinin commanded the fleet, which made him valuable to Geder, but he was also family, now that Jorey and Sabiha were married.

And, of course, there was Ternigan.

The Lord Marshal was an excellent strategist and had more experience commanding in the field than anyone else at court, and perhaps because of his habit of strategic thought, he’d placed himself on the winning side of almost every conflict in a generation. By being the man of talent, he made himself someone to be won over. Someone to be wooed.

And so he also made himself vulnerable.

For Geder to fall from power, he had to be alienated from the best minds in the empire and surrounded instead with charming idiots and the pleasantly incompetent. Knowing what she did of Geder’s temper and distrust, she thought the exercise might not be that difficult. At least not with low-hanging fruit like Bassim Ternigan.

The temptation was to rush. To hurry. To create some crisis out of the whole cloth. The wiser choice was to wait and listen until the world in all its incomprehensible complexity presented her an opportunity, and then to be ready for it. She stayed at court as much as she could, maintained what friendships she had, and tried to keep her private role gathering information as loyal traitor separate from being her sons’ mother.

It was not always possible.

“Having a permanent port on the Inner Sea will change everything,” Vicarian said around a mouthful of roast pork. “There’s rumor that Palliako’s going to send Lord Skestinin there.”

“Well, Father hasn’t mentioned anything to me,” Sabiha said. She was looking better, Clara thought. Brighter about the eyes, easier with her smile. She wasn’t a pretty girl exactly, and all the more interesting for that. “All he’s said is that wintering in Nus will be much more pleasant than Estinport.”

“May just be a rumor,” Jorey said.

“Likely that,” Vicarian agreed. “Honestly, I thought the court was the breeding ground for unfounded guesses spoken as fact, but it’s nothing compared to the seminary. I think it’s because we’re supposed to spend so much time praying that we all get bored.”

“Don’t be impious, dear,” Clara said without any real heat in her voice. “And don’t speak with your mouth full.”

“Yes, Mother,” Vicarian said. With his mouth full.

Though she had known that he might arrive at some point, her middle son’s arrival in Camnipol had been a pleasant surprise. It had occasioned dinners at Lord Skestinin’s manor three nights in a row with the family and a few close friends. Elisia had even come with her child, Corl, but without her husband. Seeing her daughter and grandson had been joyful in a way that Clara hadn’t expected, but even as she cooed over the boy, her other self was noting that dining with Jorey and Sabiha wasn’t too shameful for Elisia’s delicate social sensibilities any longer. It would be interesting to see if the effect outlasted Vicarian’s visit. If so, it would hardly have been a year before Dawson’s treason was being forgotten. Only, no. Not forgotten. Ascribed to someone else. The attempt on Geder’s life and the plot against Simeon and Aster were both hidden assaults by a vast and shadowed Timzinae conspiracy now, and in the process, the truth of the matter was forgotten. It was eerie to watch it happen, but it was also to Jorey’s benefit, so while she could see the rank injustice of it, she couldn’t think it entirely evil.

“I’m not sure you can accuse him of impiety, Mother,” Elisia said. “It’s his newfound piety that brought him, after all.”

“My piety’s not newfound,” Vicarian said. “It’s my appreciation for what it’s going to take to get a placement worth having. Everyone with any power at all is tripping over their toes to study under Minister Basrahip.”

“Is his cult that important?” Clara said. “Why, it seems only yesterday everyone was laughing down their sleeves at it.”

“It’s nearly the only important sect in the kingdom now,” Vicarian said. “Temples are going up in Kaltfel, Asinport, Nus. Now Inentai and Suddapal. And everyone’s assuming Kiaria, once Ternigan’s burned it clean enough for civilized habitation. All of them are dedicated to the spider goddess. Anyone who’s keeping strictly to the old rites won’t be placed there. And there’s talk of converting the temple in Kavinpol. This is the first time Minister Basrahip has taken on initiates from outside wherever he was out in the Keshet. Everyone put in for it.”

“But you got lucky,” Jorey said.

Vicarian grinned, and Clara could see for a moment the boy he’d been at six years old. “May have called in a couple favors for it.”

It was what she had hoped for, of course. After Dawson’s death, she had done everything she could to see that her children were safe, that they had the chance to reinvent themselves in Palliako’s court. She had only lost Barriath, and that to exile rather than death. And yet she sat in the dining hall with the richest dinner she’d enjoyed in months, the windows all opened, and the evening breeze setting the candles to flutter and snap, and her pleasure was tainted by doubt. She felt she was helping her boys scramble up a tree as she cut it down. But that was simplistic. If Palliako fell and a new Lord Regent took his place, the court would still be made from the same people. Rearranged by the rupture, perhaps, as they had been before and would be again.

Still, she could wish that Vicarian had saved his favors for a better occasion.

After the last of the meal was finished, Elisia made her farewells and went off, Corl and his nurse trailing along behind with her guardsmen. Clara wasn’t sure when walking with guards had become normal for members of court, but it was now. Then they sat together in Lord Skestinin’s narrow drawing room. The taste of Jorey’s tobacco reminded her what real leaf was like. She was in real danger of becoming used to the cheap-ground that sold in the alley mouths near the Prisoner’s Span. They joked and played at tiles and cards. Except that Dawson and Barriath weren’t there, it was a perfect evening, and it passed too quickly into night.

When, at last, Clara prepared to make her own farewells, Jorey took her discreetly aside.

“I haven’t been keeping you up with everything,” he said. “I didn’t want to raise hopes if I wasn’t sure. But from the last letters I’ve had, I think Lord Skestinin is going to back me at court. Between his word and Geder still seeming to like me, I think I’ll be able to take on the management of some of his lands while he’s with the navy.”

“That’s lovely, dear,” Clara said, tears jumping to her eyes. “I’m so glad for you. And Sabiha too. She’s … I’m so glad you married her. She seems simply perfect. And by that I mean strong, because strong is so important in a woman’s life, even if no one particularly says it.” She was babbling, words flowing without her knowing what they would be or if she meant them.

Jorey took her hand and pressed something into it. A small cloth purse of the sort she usually took her allowance from him in.

“It comes with a slightly better income,” he said. “Sabiha and I talked about it, and we wanted you to have part too.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Clara said, her fingers curling around the coins. Clutching them. “Really, you mustn’t.”

“I must, Mother. And I will.”

It didn’t help stop the tears. She kissed Jorey’s cheek and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“You are very good to me,” she murmured. “You have been very, very good.”

“I turned you out,” he said.

“Of course you did, dear,” she said, and for a moment, her new self spoke. The woman she was still becoming. “I will always be complicit in what your father did. It’s part of who I am now. Your distance from me was necessary, and it still is. You did right.”

“Still—”

“No, dear. No still. No if only. What your father did and what I do can’t be part of what you are. Not any longer. Don’t be ashamed of that. If I’d had more strength and wisdom, I’d have gone on my own.”

Jorey looked at his hands.

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” he said. “But thank you for saying it.”

Vincen Coe waited at door to the street, chatting with the door slave and looking in the torchlight like a servant waiting for his master. That gave Clara pause. Treating Vincen as if he were only what he had been before seemed somehow monstrous. And yet what option did she have? She could no more invite a lesser huntsman formerly in her husband’s service to sit at the table with Jorey and Vicarian than she could call Dawson back from the dead. She tried to imagine Vincen sitting in the drawing room with Jorey. Or worse, with Elisia. The familiarity with someone so clearly of a lower class would make her daughter’s eyes explode. She really was more Dawson’s child than her own. Nor would it be a kindness to Vincen to place him in a context in which the gulf between their stations was made obvious.

Sabiha was the one to see her safely to the door, to Vincen’s arm, as was appropriate after all for the lady of the household. She’d done the same a thousand times while Dawson sat in the drawing room with his dogs. Vincen stepped forward, bowing the way he would had he been only what he seemed. Clara had the sudden and powerful impulse to put the young man’s arm around her waist. Sabiha would certainly have been shocked, but she had also stepped outside what women were permitted, and shocked wasn’t the same as scandalized.

“Clara?” Sabiha said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, dear, I am. Just lost in my own mind for a moment.”

Sabiha took her hands and smiled into her eyes. Clara smiled back from across a gulf as wide as the Division that only she knew was there. Then the moment passed, and Clara marched off resolutely into the dark streets of Camnipol, Vincen walking a pace behind and to the left, as a good servant would until they crossed the bridge and Clara brought him to her side. Even with his injuries and the time spent recuperating, Vincen’s arm was solid. Clara tried to remember when Dawson’s had been the same, but in truth, he hadn’t. Strong, yes. But Vincen was a degree shorter than Dawson had been, and the proportion of his arm different. Their two bodies couldn’t be mistaken. Vincen was unavoidably and utterly Vincen, and Dawson was gone past all recall. She had mourned him for a year, as best she could when she was mourning everything else and rejoicing in between.

It had been a year, and imperfect as it was, she had done the best she could. Her children were reestablishing themselves in the lives they’d chosen or forged or found.

All around them, the city was preparing for a bad winter. The men and women of noble blood knew that the food would be thin this season the way they knew a particular march, recognizing it by the first notes. The men and women in the streets of Camnipol would be the ones playing the instruments and singing the melodies. For Jorey and Sabiha and even Vicarian, it would be the difference between eating meat every day or only once a week. For Abatha and Vincen, for Aly and Mihal, it would be the difference between eating every day or every other. And as hard as winter would be, spring before the first crops came would be worse. It expressed itself in small ways: the timbre of the voices of begging children, the weariness and resignation in the shoulders of carters, the growing competition for day-old bread. Things she might have lived and died and never have known had only a very few things gone differently.

And instead, here she was, walking through the darkness with this peculiar, unlikely masculine animal at her side. They reached the far side of the Division, passed by the great yellow taproom with the same band of players she’d seen there before in the yard, declaiming to perhaps a dozen people.

“You know that I am entirely too old for you,” she said.

“You’ve said so, m’lady,” Vincen replied as he had before.

“You should find a woman your own age.”

“None of them are as lovely as you.”

She coughed out a laugh. “And I’ll wager you played with fire when you were a boy.”

“M’lady?”

At the mouth of an alleyway she paused, and he paused with her as she had known he would. She put her hand on his shoulder and, before he could grasp what was happening, shoved him into the wall. She felt the impact in the palms of her hands. She only had to bend her neck up a little to reach his lips, and she kept the pressure constant, pinning him in place like a flower pressed in a book. Her mouth opened his, and she bruised him. For a moment, he was too shocked, and then he wasn’t. When she stepped back, he staggered.

Her breath was fast, her heart racing. The warmth in her body was strange and wild and familiar as an old coat, long forgotten and rediscovered. When she laughed, it came from low in her throat. It came from the girl she had been at eighteen.

“My lady,” Vincen said unsteadily.

“Clara, Vincen,” she said. “My name is Clara. Now take me home with you.”

Marcus

The first days of an occupation said a lot about the war that brought it about. In the best case, the new protector would reach out to the older, established powers in the city and find ways to make the habits and expectations of the citizens work gracefully under the new regime. The worst was slaughtering everyone and burning the place to the foundations. Suddapal fell in between. There were few fires, and what there were got doused quickly. Three ships sank during the sack, and given the number of vessels at the docks, Marcus suspected they’d been scuttled by captains who for whatever reason couldn’t put out to sea. The physical city itself was treated, for the greatest part, with respect. But it was the respect of an owner for their property. It didn’t bode well for the citizens.

And neither did the march of children.

Suddapal had three gaols, a legacy of the different cities it had been before they grew together. One stood safely inland with great stone walls around lines of iron cages. The second was at the top of a cliff near the shore with cells that lay open to the weather, foul or fair. The third was an island with only a single bay and currents cruel enough to defeat even the most experienced swimmers. All three had been emptied of their prisoners and refilled with the young. From his first glance at the children packed twenty in a cage meant for six, Marcus understood what he was seeing. Not a city folded into the empire. Not a people made subjects. Slaves, then, at best. And more likely, the culling that Kit had feared. The man did pick the worst times to be right.

The new protector—an improbably mustached Firstblood named Fallon Broot—had set a curfew for all Timzinae in the city. No one on the streets from dusk to dawn. Marcus had seen a fisherman at the piers shouting that the catch would be gone before he was on the water. The new Antean portmaster had him whipped in the street until there were bright tracks of raw meat along the chitined back. A dozen soldiers watched, laughing.

All of it put Marcus in an odd place. Like the Anteans, he was Firstblood. Like them, he was an unfamiliar face in the city. He could walk the darkened streets that the citizens no longer could. And more than that, he could pass unremarked by the new masters of Suddapal because he looked like them. Even Enen and Yardem, not technically bound by the curfew, would be noticed for their race. Marcus looked like what he was, a Firstblood soldier out of uniform and a little long in the tooth. He looked like nobody. He could ferry messages between the elements of Magistra Isadau’s shadow company with less danger than anyone else in the branch.

Or at least less danger from the invaders.

“Isadau sent me,” Marcus said, his hands at his shoulders, palms out. The blade pressed against his throat.

“The hell she did,” the Timzinae man holding it said.

“My name is Marcus Wester. I’m guard captain for the Porte Oliva branch.” It might not be true, but going into the complexities of his employment seemed like a poor decision. “I came here with Magistra bel Sarcour.”

“Prove it.”

“You have seven children hidden in the attic right now. You sent the message this afternoon as a letter asking about a loan for a new millstone.”

The blade came tighter, drawing a trickle of blood. The compound around him was less than a fifth of the bank’s size. Hardly bigger than a Northcoast farmhouse. They were in the dining room, the remnants of the night’s meal still on wooden plates. In addition to the man presently in position to open his throat, there were four by the benches with knives. This, Marcus thought, would be a profoundly stupid way to die.

“System could have broken,” the man behind him hissed. “Been intercepted. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

“Because I don’t have fifty Antean soldiers outside throwing lit torches through the windows and putting arrows in anyone who runs out,” Marcus said. “Why would they bother trying to trick you?”

There was a long pause. The blade went away, and Marcus put his hand to his neck. The cut wasn’t much worse than he’d do to himself shaving, but it was embarrassing to have been overcome. His reflexes were getting slower. He wondered if it was another effect of the poisoned sword he’d left with Yardem and Kit or just the creeping in of age.

“Sorry,” the man said, wiping his blade clean of Marcus’s blood. “Can’t be too careful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Marcus said. “I have a message from the magistra. There’s a ship going out to Pût tomorrow just before noon. Captain’s name is Brust. His ship’s got a double hull.”

“A fucking smuggler, then,” one of the men at the table said and spat. “I hate smugglers.”

“What exactly do you think it is we’re doing?” Marcus said crossly, and a pounding came at the street door. The Timzinae froze.

“In the name of the Protector, open the door!” a voice called. The accent was Antean. The man who’d been ready to kill Marcus moments before pushed him back into a pantry closet.

“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t make a damned sound or you’ll get us all killed.”

Marcus nodded and pulled the door almost shut. Through the slit he left himself, he could hear the doors open and the Anteans pushing in. The voices were harsh, pressing in over each other. Marcus wondered if the children hiding above him could hear it all too.

“We had a report. Someone came here in violation of the curfew,” a new voice said, and Marcus felt his blood go cold. He peeked out. The man wore no armor, but brown robes. His wiry hair was pulled back and his long face could have been Kit’s twenty years ago. One of the priests. The man with the blade drew in his breath to lie and doom them all and Marcus stepped out of the closet.

“That was likely me,” he said.

“And who are you?” the priest said. There were four more Antean blades behind him, and God knew how many waiting in the street.

“Marcus Wester. I work for the Medean bank.”

The priest’s eyes narrowed as he consulted the spiders in his blood. Marcus’s flesh crawled a little, just thinking about it. Behind him two of the Firstblood men exchanged a glance. Nice to have the name recognized.

“What are you doing?” the blade man said.

“Telling the truth,” Marcus said, and stopped himself before he went on with, We have nothing to hide. Because of course they did.

“Why are you here?” the priest asked.

“Business. The magistra had a note this afternoon about a loan for a new millstone. She wanted me to follow up on it since she can’t. Curfew and all.”

“A millstone? Was there nothing else?”

No would be a lie. Marcus smiled and shrugged, his brain casting about wildly.

“I can get you the note, if you’d like,” he said. And then, “You won’t find anything else in it.”

“And yet when you heard us, you hid in a closet? Why was that?”

“I’ve been in occupied cities before, and they can be intimidating. I got scared, and I didn’t think it through.”

The priest cocked his head, nodded. “Thank you. It seems there’s no violation here.”

“You shouldn’t be doing business with bugs,” one of the swordsmen said. “What kind of merchant works with these?”

“Bankers can be surprisingly flexible where there’s money involved,” Marcus said. “But I’ll tell them what you said.”

It was over, but there was still a chance it could go the other way. If the Anteans still thought of themselves as coming to enforce the curfew, they’d go now. If not, there was still plenty of chance for a bloodbath. But with him and the five Timzinae, the odds were good that at least one of the Anteans wouldn’t walk out. Apparently the swordsmen came to the same conclusion.

“Next time, you open the door faster,” he said, pointing his blade at one of the Timzinae who hadn’t actually opened the door at all, “or there’ll be trouble. You understand me?”

“I do,” the Timzinae man said, and the Anteans withdrew, scowling as they went.

When the door was shut, Marcus sagged down onto a bench. The sense of narrowly avoiding death left him slightly nauseated. There was a time when things like that had felt exciting, but he’d been a younger man.

“You all right?” the blademan said.

“I am,” Marcus said. “Or anyway I will be. Listen, those priests? You can’t ever lie to them. Or listen to them if you can help it. They’ve got spiders in their blood that give them power over truth and lies.”

The blade man’s nictitating membranes closed, and he nodded slowly.

“All right,” he said. “You say so.”

Marcus chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, I have a friend. If he told you, you’d think it was true.”

This, Marcus thought, isn’t going to work.

They’re good people,” Magistra Isadau said. “Reliable. They won’t say what they know.”

“And in another situation, that would matter,” Marcus said. “But you built all this thinking you’d have to deal with swords and magistrates. Cunning men, maybe. Torturers. But this? These things change everything. The network you built didn’t take the spiders into account.”

The Timzinae woman gazed out the window, her face hard as stone. The meeting room looked out over the street, the city. The wind was coming in from the north, pulling low clouds with it. It wouldn’t rain, or not much; the mountains north of Kiaria would have wrung the clouds dry. All of Suddapal’s rain came from the south. What these brought was the first bite of the coming winter. Marcus looked at Cithrin. She had the distant, calm look that came when she was thinking. That was good. One of the magistras of the Medean bank needed to be able to look at things coldly, and Isadau’s grief was going to make that hard.

“What would you recommend?” Cithrin asked.

“First off, tell everyone what we’re working against. The biggest advantage they have is that people don’t know what they are. But be quiet about it. It’s a hard thing to believe unless you’ve seen it, and if they start marching the priests through the streets with speaking trumpets talking about how they can’t tell when you’re lying, people will believe them and we’ll be right back where we are now.”

Cithrin nodded. “And we can’t work together. Not safely. It has to be individual, uncoordinated efforts. We’ll need a way to support them without anybody knowing who’s giving the support or who’s receiving it.”

“Don’t see how that’s practical,” Marcus said.

“Really?” Cithrin said. She seemed genuinely surprised. “It isn’t difficult. We put a bounty on safe children. Anyone who brings a child from Elassae to Carse or Porte Oliva is paid out of a fund that’s administered by … oh, I don’t know. A mysterious figure in black, only of course it’s really the bank. Anyone who cares to add to the fund can send gold to some particular address and we won’t know who they are. Anyone who arrives with a child gets the payment without questions being asked. How they get there is their own problem. They solve it however they solve it, and they can’t be betrayed, because we won’t know.”

“They’ll send assassins,” Isadau said. “The Anteans will send men to kill whoever does it. They’ll send their filthy priests.”

“So we have guards and make them cut thumbs, just like on any contract,” Cithrin said. Then, to Marcus, “I can draw up a full plan in a day or so. If Komme approves it, we can have it in place before the first frost.”

“And how would we tell people?” Isadau snapped.

“Piece of chalk, and a dark night, and as many walls as you can reach,” Marcus said. “Best not to get caught, but that’s going to be true of any of this.”

“And it doesn’t have to be only the children,” Cithrin said, her voice a mix of contemplation and pleasure. “We can put bounties on anything we want done. Bring proof that you’ve killed an Antean soldier or stolen their food or interfered with the flow of orders. The same coins can pay for any number of things. That’s what makes them dangerous. Of course, it’ll be messy. We’ll have to expect a certain amount of fraud. Unless … If we had Master Kit—”

“It’s a good thought,” Marcus said, “but we’ve only got one of him, and I’ll need him worse.”

Cithrin’s expression fell. He’d guessed it might. He tried to ignore the knot of guilt under his ribs. He ran his fingertips against the grain of the tabletop and waited for her to speak.

“Need him,” Cithrin said, trying to keep her tone light. Merely curious. “What for?”

“Job hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “We have to kill the goddess. I’m taking Kit to Camnipol. We’ll see if we can’t find that mysterious source of yours and learn what we can about the expeditions they sent out. What they’re looking for. Whether they’ve found anything.”

Isadau’s voice was harsh. “You’d take the one man we have who can match their power and run after shadows?”

“I’d take the sword too.”

“Why?” Cithrin asked.

“May want to kill some priests.”

“No, I mean why would you go to Camnipol? Why that?”

Marcus took a deep breath. In the street, a mule brayed.

“Did Yardem ever tell you about Gradis?”

“No,” Cithrin said. “I’ve only heard the name when they called you the hero of Wodford and Gradis.”

“All right, so this was the second year of the war between Lady Tracian and Lord Springmere. I was still dancing Springmere’s tune, idiot that I was. Gradis is a keep in the middle of a mountain pass. Dragon’s road runs right through it. Lady Tracian had it, and if she’d kept it, her supply lines would have been solid as stone. The thing was, she had about as many men as I did, and she had position. So I sent out a force just outside arrow’s range. Not a big one, but with all the banners. Springmere rode with it. I was there. Our three greatest allies, and not just their men, but them in person. Well, Lady Tracian saw us all out there like something out of a poem, and she knew she could take us. Sent her men out after us. So we fought for bit, and I sounded the retreat. We pulled back about half a league and reformed. Her men reformed, and we did it again. Better part of a day, she beat us back and back and back. And when she was pulled far enough back, all the sword-and-bows we’d left behind poured in and took the keep. No banners. No great men. Hardly any cavalry. Just the right force in the right place at the right time to win the fight that mattered.”

“I see,” Cithrin said.

“I don’t,” Isadau said.

Marcus scratched his neck and accidentally set his cut to bleeding again. “Normal strategy is going to lose. As long as they have the priests, we’re Lady Tracian winning battles and losing the war. But they have a weakness. Something that scares them. I don’t know what it is. As drunk on their own stories as they are, I’m not sure they do either. But whatever they’re looking for, I’m betting it’s the little force in the background that actually matters.”

“When,” Cithrin said, then coughed. “When will you go?”

“Don’t see much advantage in waiting.”

She swallowed. He had known her so long, he could see the mask slipping into place, and it left him aching.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” Cithrin bel Sarcour, voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, asked him. Her tone was a thing of ledgers and contracts. Hearing her pull away from him ached, but there was nothing to be done about it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t mind me. Just … I’ll be back. When I can.”

“Of course,” Cithrin said, and the crispness and politeness of her voice meant, Unless you die or something keeps you or you change your mind. Or stop caring whether you come back.

I would never leave you, he wanted to say, except that it was what he was doing.

The last of the meeting dragged on like a dog with a broken spine. When it was done, Cithrin retreated to her room, chin high and eyebrows arched, her stride low in her hips the way Kit and Cary had taught her to look older than she was. Marcus leaned out the window and spat on the ground. He found Kit and Yardem out by the stables with two fresh horses. The green sword was wrapped in wool and strapped on behind the saddle with his bedroll. Marcus felt a small pang of regret that they wouldn’t have their little Kesheti mule.

“How did it go, sir?” Yardem asked.

“As well as could be expected.”

“Poorly, then.”

Kit made a small sound that lived halfway between a chuckle and a groan. Marcus pulled himself into the saddle.

“It’s a long way to Camnipol,” Marcus said. “Most of it through the leavings of a war, and autumn coming on besides. And at the end, a city full of spider priests. And someone writing letters, but we don’t know his name or what he looks like. So this should be just lovely.”

“But there is hope,” Kit intoned.

“Sure,” Marcus said. “As much as there ever is. Yardem?”

“Sir?”

“The day I take back the company?”

“It’s not today, sir.”

“No. It’s not. Watch after Cithrin for me.”

“I will.”

“And thank you for … Well. Just thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“All right, then,” he said. “Kit? Let’s go find some trouble.”

Clara

She felt young. It was disturbing and strange and wonderful. Her body felt warmer, not as a metaphor for some spiritual truth, but actually warmer. Even as the days grew shorter, the dark pressing its advantage at dawn and dusk, even as the leaves traded their green for yellow and brown and red, she left her jacket and shawl at the boarding house. The cold winds with their promise of the coming snows felt soothing against her skin, like they were holding in check some painless and glorious burn.

She had never seriously imagined taking a lover. Like anyone, she’d admired men, been aware of them. Tempted by some in an unspoken and diffuse sort of way. But to move from that appreciation to action of any sort was impossible. She was a married woman. She loved her husband and been pleased with him. Dawson had been a thoughtful lover, and his delight in her matched hers in him. There had been neither call for another man nor the boredom or complacency that might give reason to hope for such a call. And now she had given way. If the court knew, she would be even more ruined than she had been before, though that was more because Vincen was a servant. If she’d found herself in the arms of some well-positioned widower with property, title, and slightly more years than her own, the only people to object would have been the ones who wanted to anyway. Vincen was young, beautiful, poor, and without standing or blood. He was too good for her and beneath her station. And when she lay in the darkness of his room, the sheet her only clothing, and thought of it all, it seemed not only to do with the animal joys but also with the act of rebellion. Taking Vincen Coe, huntsman and youth, to her bed meant that anything was possible. Anything could be done.

She was rougher with him than she had ever been with Dawson. More selfish. Because that was possible too.

The danger wasn’t that she would be discovered, though that would have been unfortunate. No. The greater peril was that her heart would take the wrong lessons from her experience. That she would become incautious and let the soaring sense of freedom and possibility sweep her to a place where possibilities vanished. A cell in Palliako’s gaols, for instance. Or a grave.

So as the days passed, and the closing of the season grew near, she tried to think. To keep her analysis of the world cool and detached and passionless, and she flattered herself that she succeeded more often than she failed. The siege at Kiaria, like the one at Nus, was taking longer than Palliako had hoped. After Suddapal and Inentai, the war had seemed to have a kind of momentum. Opinion was divided now, some feeling that Ternigan was at fault, others that perhaps even the great armies of Antea with the blessings of their newly adopted goddess were subject to the limits imposed by exhaustion, hunger, and the legendary defenses of the Timzinae stronghold.

It was, Clara thought, probably the opportunity she had been watching for. And because her heart and her flesh were in something of a riot, probably was good enough.

All that remained was putting the scheme in place. And for that, there were a few preparations that needed making, and specifically one item that she would require. Because Ernst Mecilli had not been close to Clara, she had no correspondence from him, and even if she had attempted the acquaintance, it would almost certainly have been his wife or daughter who returned the letter. For a sufficiently large sample of his hand, she needed letters. Asking for them seemed dangerously candid, and so she resolved to steal them instead.

Curtin Issandrian’s home had become shoddy since his fall from grace. The filigree and gilding that had brightened the façade seemed faded, chipped, and tawdry. The torches that marked his gate were old and burned out. The man himself wore the years hard, but his smile was genuine and his manner as gracious as it had ever been. Of all Dawson’s enemies, Clara felt most fond of him.

“A letter from your husband?”

“It would have been just at the end of the war with Asterilhold, when he was still Lord Marshal,” Clara said. “You and I had spoken about the role Alan Klin was playing in the effort, and I mentioned it to Dawson as you requested.”

“For which I am still grateful,” Issandrian said. “Though it seems I don’t have the knack for choosing allies whose stars are on the rise.”

Clara smiled and folded her hands together on her knee, pulling her shawl closer around her shoulders.

“None of us knew then what would come,” she said. Any more than we know now what may happen next, she didn’t say. “I thought he said he had written to you on the matter. And I hoped you were the sort of man who keeps his correspondence.”

Issandrian laughed, and the lines around his mouth seemed deeper than they had. How odd that they should both have suffered so much, and so differently.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am that man. But a letter from Lord Kalliam would have been something to remark on. I can’t think I’d have forgotten it.”

“Would it be forward of me to ask that you check? Just to be sure.”

“If you’d like,” he said.

“Excellent. Thank you so much,” Clara said, rising to her feet as if he had invited her to his private study and she were only accepting. To his credit, he saved her the embarrassment of being corrected and went along with the pretense. The corridors of the manor were wider than her own had been, and the red carpet that marked their center seemed faded and dusty. Through the great windows, she caught glimpses of the estate across the courtyard where Feldin Maas had lived when he lived. Where Clara and Vincen had faced the traitor’s blade with Geder Palliako and Minister Basrahip at their side. Somewhere in that garden, Vincen had tried his best to bleed to death in her arms. He had kissed her for the first time there. It was Geder Palliako’s now, since he’d been named Baron of Ebbingbaugh. It was where he would retire to when Aster claimed the throne.

Without knowing what would come or what shape the world might take, it struck Clara as quite unlikely that Geder would ever live in that house again.

“I hear that Ernst Mecilli is doing quite well for himself these days,” Clara said. “You and he were close, weren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Issandrian said. “A few philosophical debates one time and another, and an unfortunate attempt to negotiate sugar rights in Pût that we both came to regret. But I wouldn’t say we know each other particularly well.”

“It’s just I was thinking of letters, I suppose. Dawson always said Mecilli’s were awful pieces of work. Impossible to tell what the man meant.”

“Really?” Issandrian said as he opened a wide oaken door. “He always seemed cogent enough to me.”

Clara suppressed a smile. Mecilli had written to Issandrian.

“I suppose it might only have been Dawson’s temper,” Clara said. “He would sometimes see what he chose to see.”

“We’re all like that, one way and another.”

So we are, she thought.

Issandrian’s private study was a thing of beauty. If all the rest of this manor house was gone slightly to seed, this, at least, was maintained. The windows looked out on a small garden, and a stone Cinnae woman looked back, her skin the mottled texture of granite, ivy curling up her side. A whole wall was taken up with books, the leather spines in a dozen different shades. Clara sat on a divan of yellow silk and pretended to look out the window at an angle that let her watch Issandrian’s ghostly reflection in the glass. He took a parquet box down from a shelf and began extracting bundles of folded paper, each wrapped in ribbon. One, she guessed, for each correspondent. As his attention was on the pages, she unwrapped the shawl and pushed it discreetly between the divan and the wall. Her heart was beating fast. Everything was going so well, it was difficult not to giggle.

“Your gardener is doing a lovely job,” she said.

“Hm? Oh, yes, I suppose so. He seems a little tolerant of snails and slugs sometimes.”

“I suppose they need their advocates too,” Clara said.

Issandrian sighed and sat behind his desk.

“I’m sorry, but there is no letter. If there was one, it never arrived here. There was a time I pinned some not inconsiderable hope on hearing a kind word from your husband.”

“Well,” Clara said. “Thank you for looking. It’s probably silly of me. I just hoped to find something written in his hand. We lost everything when they took the estate.”

“You know,” Issandrian said, “Palliako hasn’t named a new baron for Osterling Fells. I’ve heard tell that he’s only waiting until he can give the title back to Jorey. If he does, there may be things you only thought were lost.”

“I can hope,” Clara said.

“It’s been a bad few years, hasn’t it?”

“It has,” Clara said. A brief pang of guilt touched her. Curtin Issandrian was an unlucky man, but he wasn’t a cruel one. If anything, his errors in judgment spoke of too much compassion. To exploit him seemed … not monstrous, but rude. It wasn’t a thing that a well-bred lady would do. She rose to her feet, smoothing the fabric of her skirt, and Issandrian stood as well.

“Thank you again,” she said.

They walked back toward the main halls more quietly. Issandrian’s expression was turned inward, and his hands clasped behind his back. Without the long, flowing hair he’d once affected, he seemed older. More worn. Clara waited until they’d almost reached the main hall, then stopped.

“Oh dear,” she said. “I seem to have forgotten my shawl.”

“I’ll have it fetched for you.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, turning back. “I’m still spry enough to walk. Wait for me here, I’ll just be a moment.”

She walked with a brisk rolling gait until he turned the first corner. After that, she ran. When she reached his study, it was the work of a moment to yank her shawl back. She plucked the box from its shelf, muttering to herself as she opened it. Her fingers flew through the bundles. Alan Klin. Mirkus Shoat. Two old-looking bundles from Sesil Veren. And there. Four thin letters on cream-colored paper bound with a white ribbon. Lord Mecilli. She wrapped her shawl around them and shoved the box back into place, then hurried out of the study. Issandrian met her halfway back to the hall, and she raised her shawl in triumph.

“It fell behind the divan,” she said. “I was near to giving up when I found it.”

“I’m glad the hunt succeeded without the need for dogs.”

“That would be embarrassing. Setting out the hounds to help poor Lady Kalliam find her things. Too plausible, I suppose.”

“Not at all.”

At the door to the street, she turned to him, placing her hand on his arm as she might with an old friend. Issandrian put his own hand over hers. There was no sense of flirtation, but rather a kind of shared sorrow. For a moment they stood there, old enemies from a conflict that no longer mattered. His stolen letters were in her other hand, and she felt the urge to apologize, not for what she’d done, but on behalf of the world. That they, who should somehow have been friends were not, and would not be. The moment passed, and Clara walked out into the street and turned south for her rooms, Vincen Coe at her side.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

Back at the boarding house, Clara untied the white ribbon and laid the letters out on her bed while Vincen retrieved two more lamps from unused rooms. Clara read over each of the letters, searching for particular words and phrases, the personal idioms that would mark a letter as coming from the man himself. There were several. He was quite fond of the phrase in the unfortunate event that and the word abysmal. Then she took note of the specifics of his hand and the way he formed his letters. She needn’t match it perfectly, of course. The note she intended to write in his name was something written quickly and in a state of agitation. Even if Lord Ternigan were to have letters from the true Mecilli, it would be natural to expect some departures from the usual form.

Vincen came in behind her, a plate of stewed apples and bottle of wine in his hands. They made the room smell like a kitchen in the middle of baking sweets. Clara composed the rough draft of her letter, writing the words in her own neat hand. Then she read it to Vincen, taking breaks when he fed bits of apple between her lips and also to feed him. The wine was dry and a little harsh, and the fumes went to her head. Soon she was laughing, and Vincen with her. When he began kissing her, she pushed him away. There would be time for that later. This needed to be done quickly. If the letter reached Ternigan after Kiaria fell and he was already on his way home, the scheme would fail.

She drank water and paced until she was certain that she was sober, then drew out the pen, ink, and paper she’d prepared. She wrote the whole letter twice for practice, making note of where the loops and lines of her own handwriting deviated too far from Mecilli’s. Once she was certain, she took out the thick paper she’d bought. It wasn’t the cream color of Mecilli’s but it would do.

Lord Ternigan,

I do not have time now to wait and consider. The council I have heard has convinced me that we must act, and act swiftly if we are to act at all. You have been away from court for all of the season leading the army, but I have no doubt you have heard of the abysmal failure that Palliako has become. As the food supplies in the city wane, his popularity among the court and the low people has begun to plummet. Half the court is laughing down their sleeves at him, but the other half—the half to which you and I belong—understand the seriousness of the problem.

I will not walk the dragon’s path as Kalliam did, but myself and my allies have determined that it is time to gently remove Palliako from the Severed Throne and put the care of the empire into more seasoned and steady hands. You have led the army with distinction. Forgive me for my candor, my lord, but time is short and I feel I must speak plainly. You are the one obvious choice. We are unanimous in our decision, and if you knew the names of the men who’ve agreed, it would astound you. I am sometimes surprised we can agree on the day of the week or the direction of the sunrise, but we have agreed upon you.

In the unfortunate event that you are not willing to make this service to the empire, I beg you to destroy this letter and never mention it again. But if you are willing, send word to me not at my house, but addressed to Lirin Petty at the Cold Hammer stables. I have an agent there who will retrieve your word and deliver it to me.

I understand this seems sudden, but I assure you it has been building for some time. If you respond, do so quickly. Palliako grows less stable by the day, and we cannot wait much longer.

Whatever your decision, please consider me your friend and ally,

Lord Ernst Mecilli

Clara put up her pen with a flourish and blotted the ink quickly. A hasty blotting paper covered a great number of sins. Put side by side with its fellows, hers still stood out. And it wasn’t only the paper stock. She had to hope that the differences would be ascribed to the rushed nature of the letter. For the composition itself, she thought it struck the right notes. Flattering but also hinting that the tide might turn without him. If Ternigan proved true to his reputation, he might not agree to conspire, but he would at least not close the matter definitively. That was enough for her purposes.

She folded the letter, sewed and sealed it. She had no copy of Mecilli’s signet, so she used no wax. The money she’d saved from her increased allowance would buy a fast courier. It still might be weeks before she knew whether there was a fish on her hook.

Vincen’s objection wasn’t one she’d considered.

“The Cold Hammer,” Vincen said. “You’ve spoken to them about this?”

“Not this, precisely,” Clara said. “I’ve said that if a letter arrived under the Petty name, to hold it for me. They don’t know who it will be coming from nor what it will say.”

“But Clara,” he said, and her name on his lips still had the strange joy of transgression, “they know it’s going to you. Palliako will investigate this. If he goes there, he might track the conspiracy back to you.”

“It won’t happen.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“The man who’s watching for the message was a footman in my house. When his wife birthed their first boy, I went to visit her myself. The babe was ill, and I paid for the cunning man that saved him. The man would move the sky if I asked him to,” Clara said. “Certainly, he won’t balk at a few simple lies.”

Cithrin

Marcus left her again, this time more explicably. There was less confusion. Less of the inexplicable hollowness. Half of her was angry with him for going, but the rest of her seemed resigned. He was leaving her because he felt he had to, and looking at it coldly, she agreed. She was under her own protection now. She had been for over a year. It was only seeing that her half-ackowledged hopes that it might somehow go back to what it had been—or more likely what she only imagined it had been—dashed that felt so cruel. So she took her childish sense of abandonment and added it to the list of things she had to mourn.

It was a long list.

The next Tenthday, there was no march through the streets. The occupying forces didn’t respect the tradition and had sent out an edict prohibiting groups with more than four Timzinae from gathering together in public or ten in private. The temples were empty even where the priests weren’t dead. So instead, Isadau had the little chapel in the compound cleaned with vinegar and soap. Candles and incense burned on the humble wooden altar. Cithrin left her shoes in her room in the morning and walked there, joining the others silently. Jurin, Isadau, and Kani knelt at the front in their finest clothing. Cithrin sat in the middle with the other guests who had taken hospitality in the compound and were now trapped there by the occupation. The servants sat at the back. There were considerably more than ten Timzinae in the room, but no one mentioned it. There weren’t any Anteans either.

Still, Cithrin wondered what would happen if the spider priest came back and asked whether there had been any violations of the edict. It made her uncomfortable to risk the notice of the new authorities without need. There were so many needful risks still to take that wasting them here seemed decadent.

When the time came for the priest to arrive, Yardem Hane stepped out from the hallway. He wore a dark robe that went to his feet, and the rings in his ears looked different from the usual. He lowered his eyes, gathered himself, and brought his wide chin up.

“I am not a priest of your faith,” he said, and his voice rolled through the air like a distant landslide. “Nor, any longer, of my own. I was once a holy man, though I am not now. Magistra Isadau and her siblings have asked me to speak here today, and I agreed to the request so long as I could make it clear that I am not a priest.”

Cithrin smiled. She could see the discomfort in the Tralgu’s wide, canine expression, even if the others couldn’t. Her sympathy for him expressed itself as amusement.

“I have seen a large number of cities fall. Sometimes I’ve been part of the reason that they did. Sometimes I was one of the men who’d tried to protect them and failed. But for whatever reason I was there, what I’ve seen followed a pattern, and though I make no claim to righteousness, I hoped to share that with you here.

“Often when we gather in places of worship, it is in celebration. Celebrations of marriage or of birth. The smaller celebrations of the good in our lives. Even funerals are celebrations of lives well lived. And also we come together to mourn the evil and the sorrow and the pain in the world. Our failings and the world’s. We acknowledge these to each other because, whatever our race, whatever the shapes of our bodies and the inclination of our minds, doing this makes us more human. And by more human, I also mean more holy.”

Cithrin’s amusement and embarrassment on Yardem’s behalf had fallen away. His voice was warm and soft as old flannel. Someone behind her was weeping now, and Yardem frowned in thought. His huge hands patted at the empty air in front of him.

“When a city is taken in war, the loss to those who loved what the city had been is great. But that loss is doubled because we fear to mourn it. For good reason. There are men in Suddapal now who would beat us, possibly kill us, if they felt we were disrespectful of them. In every city I have seen that suffered what your city suffers now, there is a numbness and sense of being cut off from each other. It’s a funeral where no one laughs and no one cries, and it leaves us emptier than the loss alone would have. And so, today, instead of a religious service, I was hoping we might have a funeral for the cities that we have lost. Nus and Inentai and Suddapal. And Vanai.”

To her surprise, Cithrin felt tears in her eyes. She kept her chin high. She might weep, but she wasn’t going to snivel. Yardem spoke for a few moments more about Suddapal and when he had come to the city as a younger man. How it had changed in the years since, and how he had, and how the differences in them both had given him a sense of kinship with it. Then he asked Magistra Isadau to stand, and she spoke about the innate conflict of being a woman of business with her first loyalties to power and profit, and at the same time a citizen of the five cities. And her favorite places within them. Then Jurin spoke about showing his son the cavern at the center of the commons for the first time, and walking with his grandmother to the marketplace the last time she went. He talked of the fear he felt for the children taken by Antea. And soon, Cithrin was making no pretense of dignity, nor was anyone else. One by one, the people stood and spoke or else only sobbed, and Cithrin wept with them.

She didn’t see Yardem come to her side. His hand was simply on hers, and then without knowing how it had happened, he was leading her up to the altar. The faces looked up at her, waiting for her to speak. I can’t do this, she thought, and from the back of her mind a small voice replied, Yes, I can.

“Suddapal wasn’t my city,” she said. “That was Vanai. The Antean army took it … took it from me. And they took the people who raised me and loved me, if anybody did. There was a place by the canal by the bank house where there was a little boy who sold coffee with his father, and they … they took them too. They took everything there and they burned it.”

A sorrow she hadn’t known was there opened in her, vast as oceans, and she hung her head for a moment and Yardem stepped toward her. She put out a hand to stop him, gritted her teeth, and raised her head.

“I haven’t cried. I haven’t mourned. I haven’t let myself be angry for that loss. I never felt it because feeling it would have broken me. And now, with all of you here as witness, I am broken. I am broken, but I’m not dead. And I am not finished.”

The hand that touched her shoulder wasn’t Yardem’s. Magistra Isadau turned Cithrin to her, wrapped her arms around Cithrin’s shaking body, and pulled her close. Cithrin wept, and more than wept. She howled like a baby who’d lost her mother and her father, which she also was. She screamed into the older woman’s flesh, and she did it with half a hundred men and women watching her do it, and she felt no shame.

“Good girl,” Isadau murmured. “Oh, good, good girl. You’ll be fine. Your heart isn’t going to die. You’re fine.”

Cithrin held the Timzinae woman close and would not let her go.

It’s going to fall apart,” Yardem said. “All respect, the network was dangerous when it was only standing up against soldiers, bureaucrats, and cunning men. These tainted priests make it impossible.”

“I know,” Isadau said. “Two of the people who agreed to work with me have already missed meetings. I was able to get word out that if the priest questions you, not to answer any questions. They aren’t lying if they don’t speak.”

Yardem grunted like he had taken a blow. Isadau raised her eyebrows.

“Not speaking can be made difficult,” he said.

The courtyard had turned from lush green to leathery brown as if overnight. Autumn had come to Suddapal, and the crispness of the air said that winter would come quickly behind it. Isadau sat on a wooden stool, her body rigid and tense. Yardem stood at ease, a soldier again instead of a priest. Cithrin’s pacing contrasted with their stillness, but she couldn’t help it. Movement made her thoughts feel clearer and the knot in her belly less likely to lead to vomiting again. Fallen leaves crackled under her feet and skittered away from her toes where she kicked them.

“We have to make contingency plans,” Isadau said, “in the event I am detained by the new magistrate.”

“Why?” Cithrin asked.

“Because she’s going to be detained by the new magistrate,” Yardem said.

“She doesn’t have to be,” Cithrin said. “She can go to Carse.”

“I won’t abandon my city,” Isadau said. “I know that I can’t help for much longer. But so long as I can, I will. If anything, it’s you who should leave. I’ve written to Komme. He agrees that losing two of his magistras is worse than losing one.”

“I won’t leave you,” Cithrin said. “I won’t go while you’re here.”

“Then I’m afraid Komme is going to have a very unpleasant year,” Isadau said. Jurin stepped into the garden and nodded to Isadau. The magistra rose to her feet. “Please excuse me,” she said, and followed her brother out.

Cithrin kicked a small pile of leaves. Her mind felt like a cat in a cage, pacing, looking for a pathway out because she wanted it to be there more than from the expectation that it would be.

“She’s doing exactly what Marcus said,” Cithrin said. “She’s fighting battles and losing wars.”

“She knows she’s doomed. She’s made that choice. Her informants are already being caught up. I’ll be surprised if they don’t come for her by next Tenthday.”

“God damn that woman,” Cithrin said. “That stubborn, senseless—”

“If she can save one more child before she falls, it will have been worth it to her. And there’s no one else who can do what she’s doing. She knows the city. She knows the people. It’s the only advantage she has, and in most conditions, it would be significant.”

“It’s going to get her killed.”

“It is.”

Cithrin said something obscene, then she stopped. Yardem’s ears went flat.

“Magistra?”

“I know people too,” she said.

Dear Geder—

I’m sorry I haven’t written to you sooner. At first it was that I was so busy with the business of the bank that even though I kept meaning to, I never seemed to find the time. And then, after it had been so long, I started feeling awkward about it having been so long. I know it sounds stupid, and I suppose it is. But there you have it. I didn’t write, and I’m sorry for it, and I’m writing you now.

And, to make matters worse, I’m writing to ask a favor. Since last we saw each other, I’ve been reassigned within the bank. I am now the voice of the Medean bank in Suddapal, which I believe technically makes me one of your subjects. And while I understand the need for security, I’ve found some of your commanders here a bit difficult to work with. They have military minds, which is all well and good for what they’re doing, but difficult for someone trying to run a business. I was wondering if you could put in a good word for me? If you could even just assure them that I’m not involved in any devious conspiracies against you, I think it would make things better all around, and not only for me.

Tell Aster I miss him, and you, and that terrible cat-piss stinking hole we lived in. Who would ever have guessed those would be the good old days?

Your friend, Cithrin bel Sarcour

“You. Are. Mad,” Isadau said as she sat at her desk, the draft of the letter in her hand. Her face had gone ashen.

“It’s a better plan than yours,” Cithrin said. “I didn’t put together your network. I can say that without lying, and so I can talk around any hard questions better than you. And if Geder does this, his people will think twice before they come too near to the bank. None of those are advantages you have, and they aren’t ones you can get. These are mine. Your advantages are that more people know your role and are in a position to betray you; you’re Timzinae, and Geder’s decided to hate the Timzinae; and … well? What else? That may be all you have to bring to the table.”

“Cithrin, you must not do this.”

“How long is it going to be before your network collapses? Weeks? Days? I can keep some version of it running for months at least. Maybe more. I can do it better than you can. Forget about me. Forget about the bank. If your work falls in a week, who will help the people a month from now? If you leave and leave now, there will still be help for them. If you stay, you’re condemning them. You’re condemning every person that I could have helped if you had let me.”

Isadau folded the page and put it on her desk as gently as if it might shatter. Or she might. Cithrin waited.

“Reckless without being stupid,” Isadau said.

“Is that a yes?”

“It would work better with both of us present,” Isadau said. “Send your letter. Give me the cover to work. I will stay here with you.”

“No,” Cithrin said. “On one hand, you’re genuinely guilty and I’m not. And on the other, this is my price. You give me the bank. You leave. I help as many people get out from under the occupation as I can, and if the chance comes to do the empire some damage, all the better. But in return, you’re my first client. You and whoever else you pick will leave the city now for Birancour or Herez or Northcoast. I don’t want to know where you’re going. Only that you’re gone, and that I can’t call you back. It’s important that I be able to not lie about that.”

Isadau bent forward slowly, her hands at her belly. She looked as if she were laughing or in pain, but she only rested there a moment, bent half over, her eyes closed and her lips in a smile that looked like pain. When she opened her eyes again, she was herself.

“I had resigned myself to dying, you know,” she said.

“I did,” Cithrin said, and the tears threatened to come back. “It was fucking annoying.”

“I accept your proposal,” Isadau said. “But not for me. You took the negotiation when you held the lives of the children you could save that I couldn’t.”

“Attacking at the base. You were justifying your plan to yourself because it was selfless,” Cithrin said. “I undermined that by pointing out that it left innocent lives on the table when my plan recovered them. And since you only had one overwhelming argument, it all came down. If you’d wanted to win, you’d have needed to show that the bank would lose less capital if you stayed or that the cost of your leaving was significantly greater than staying here and being caught.”

“Only you’d have had arguments prepared against them.”

“Still do, if you’re tempted,” Cithrin said.

“Imaniel taught you well,” Isadau said.

“So did you.”

Magistra Isadau left the next day, going overland with Jurin, Kani, and almost half the household. They left a few minutes apart so that they might be mistaken for several unrelated groups and to keep within the dictates of the laws against assembly. Isadau was in the last group to go. She wore a simple traveling gown with a split skirt for riding and a hood she had plucked up to hide her face. Astride her little mule, she looked more like a hardland farmer than the voice of the most powerful bank in the world. Cithrin walked beside her to the gate. In the street, four Antean soldiers were laughing and kicking stones down the road like boys. One looked over when the gate opened, but his expression was bored.

“Thank you, Cithrin,” Isadau said. “Please save what you can, but don’t die here. Not for me.”

“I’m in this war to win,” Cithrin said. “If you see Pyk or Komme, tell them what we discussed about putting up a bounty system. I’ll see you again when I see you.”

Isadau urged the little mule on, and Enen closed the gate behind her. Cithrin turned to look at the compound. When she’d come here, it had been a strange, threatening place. Now it was in fact a thousand greater threat to her life, and she didn’t fear it at all. This was her place now. Her word was the word of the bank, and it had the force of gold and Komme Medean behind it.

“Nicely done, ma’am,” Yardem said.

“Thank you. Now let’s go about not regretting it, shall we?”

“Yes, ma’am. There’s the matter of the letter to the Lord Regent.”

“I know. Call for a courier and we’ll send it. But I need to write one other first.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In Magistra Isadau’s office—Cithrin’s office now—she sat at the desk and gathered her thoughts. The breeze through the windows was chilly, and she kept her cloak on. The flames from the lamp only warmed the air a little. The refugees Isadau had taken in still made music that carried through the afternoon air. The kitchens still filled the world with the scents of baking bread and roasting meat. One might almost imagine it had always been like this, and that it would always be.

She took a clean sheet of paper, a brass-nibbed pen, and a jar of ink. When she wrote, it was directly into the bank’s cipher, as if it were her natural language.

Komme—

I regret to find myself with somewhat awkward news to report. It seems I’ve taken over another of your banks.

Marcus

The fastest route to Camnipol was west to Orsen in the Free Cities, and then following the dragon’s road north through the eastern reaches of the Dry Wastes. The first danger was the Antean army camped before the massive gates of Kiaria. Holding to the south would avoid the soldiery, but the siege was going on too long. The Anteans would be pulling food out of the countryside as quickly as they could, and that meant Kit and Marcus were going to be two travelers in a countryside filled with desperate people. While they had the poisoned sword and Kit’s spiders, neither one would be much good against an unexpected arrow. Then there were the mountains that divided Elassae from the Free Cities. They’d spent more than their fair share of time among mountains in the Keshet, but winter was coming on, and an early snowstorm would also negate all their advantages, though Marcus would sometimes imagine Kit shouting, You shall not snow at the low grey clouds. Those, at least, were the extraordinary dangers. Bandits, hunting cats, snakes, and fevers barely warranted mention.

“It seems to me you’ve been quite cheerful,” Kit said.

“I suppose I am,” Marcus said.

“Not having as many nightmares either.”

“They’ll be back. They always are. But it was good seeing Cithrin and Yardem again.”

“Mmm,” Kit said with an amused smile.

Orsen was the easternmost of the Free Cities, and the best defended. It was built on a high, flat-topped mountain that stood in the center of a plain. Marcus had traveled a fair part of the world and never seen another detail of geography to match the flatness of the landscape interrupted by the massive stone. The mountain was also odd in that its stone was ruddy granite that seemed more in place in Borja or Hallskar. Coming into the valley, the thread of red soil radiating from it showed where centuries of rain and wind had begun to erode the mountain down into the more familiar soil. It seemed to Marcus that something immense and strange had happened here, long ago, and no one knew what it might have been. But there was a dragon’s road and a defensible patch of land, and that was all humanity needed to make itself at home.

Rather than take the time to follow the narrow, switch-backed roads up to the city itself, Marcus and Kit stopped at an inn at the mountain’s foot. The groom, a young and painfully thin man, took their horses. A woman perhaps a decade older than Marcus and still young enough to be vital welcomed them as they entered the dim warmth of the common room. The knot of Antean soldiers at the table nearest the fire looked up at them with flat and empty expressions. Marcus nodded and took a seat not far enough to seem like he was avoiding them, and not so near that his murmurs to Kit could be easily heard.

The lady of the house brought them mugs of good cider and plates of gristly pork with a pepper sauce that kept Marcus from knowing whether the meat had started to turn. He watched the soldiers out of the corner of his eye. The five of them hunched close to each other, talking low. Every few seconds, one or another of them would glance over at Marcus.

No, not at him. At Kit.

“Interesting,” Marcus said.

“What?” Kit asked, drinking his cider and ignoring his meat.

“Our friends at the next table there. I do believe they’re deserters.”

“Really?” Kit said, and began shifting on his bench to glance at them. Marcus put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Think so,” Marcus said. “And I think they recognize you as looking as if you might be one of the priests. Because ever since we stepped in, they’ve been jumpy as mice that smell a cat. And seeing how they outnumber us more than double, I’m thinking we’re in a position that—”

The Anteans rose in a group, drawing their blades. The benches they’d sat on clattered to the ground as Marcus drew his own blade and put himself between the attackers and Kit. The lady of the house screamed and ran out the door. The chances she’d be back with timely help seemed thin.

“There’s no need for violence,” Kit said, and his voice filled the space. “You can put down your—”

“Shut up, you bastard!” the nearest of the Anteans shouted. “One more word out of you, and I swear we’ll cut you down and burn whatever comes out.”

Five men, Marcus thought, was a damned lot of people. But they hadn’t attacked yet. If anything, they seemed more frightened. He backed up slowly, pushing his table with the backs of his legs as he went, trying to clear a path for the men to leave if they wanted to.

“They followed us,” a dark-skinned one at the back said. “Lani, they followed us.”

“Well, and if they didn’t you just told them my name,” the man at the front said. “And thanks for that.”

“Lani?” Marcus said. “My name’s Wester. We don’t need to—”

The attack was fast and disorganized. Lani jumped forward, his blade swinging high. Marcus blocked and made a low counterstrike by long habit. Lani grunted with pain, falling half a step back and preparing for Marcus to press the advantage, but by then two of the others had stepped to their leader’s side. Marcus could see them preparing to attack in unison. He couldn’t block them both.

Kit’s cider mug came from behind him in a low, fast arc and shattered against the nose of the man on Lani’s right. Marcus thrust at the one on the left, who fell back, cursing.

“I don’t want this,” Marcus said. “We’re not hunting you.”

“We’re not going back!” Lani shouted, and then as if on a signal, all five men turned and bolted for the yard, leaving Marcus and Kit alone in the common room. Marcus moved forward carefully. Retreating to the next room to set up an ambush was an idiot’s plan when you already had five blades to the opponent’s one, but working with the assumption that his enemies weren’t idiots would have had its drawbacks as well. Keeping the blade at the ready, he moved forward step by careful step. The sound of hooves pelting away down the road left him feeling a little more certain, and when he reached the yard, the thin groom’s confused expression and the cloud of dust in the west were enough that Marcus sheathed his blade. Kit’s familiar footsteps came up behind him.

“Well,” Marcus said. “That’s not good.”

“Don’t you think so?” Kit asked. “It seems to me it might be quite a hopeful sign. Men are beginning to abandon the Antean army. And did you hear what they said to me? Cut me and burn whatever comes out? That sounds to me as if some other people within the enemy forces have begun to see that something odd is going on, and they aren’t celebrating it.”

“That’s true,” Marcus said. “It’s not what I meant, though.”

“No?”

“I’m fairly sure they stole our horses.”

“Ah,” Kit said. “That’s not good.”

“Isn’t. You think you might be able to use those uncanny powers of yours to find us some replacements?”

“I assume we can walk up to the city. It might take some time to earn enough to buy horses, but we can try.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of walking up to someone on a nice horse and asking them to let us use it.”

Kit made an uncomfortable kind of grunt and Marcus looked over at him.

“I believe the power—her power—can become a path of corruption. An opportunity, as it were, to lose what is most valuable about ourselves.”

“Yeah. Saving the world here, Kit,” Marcus said. “Let’s keep focus on that.”

The old actor sighed.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Once they’d reached the dragon’s road, they moved as fast as a courier, changing for fresh horses twice a day. The fields, farms, and wild places of Antea spread around them like a vast grey-brown cloak. The trees were shedding their summer green. In the fields they passed, Firstblood farmers rode on mules with whips at their sides while Timzinae men and women harvested the last of the autumn crops—pumpkins and gourds and winter wheat. Whenever they passed a low temple, the banner of the spider goddess flew from its roof. And even with all this for warning, Marcus was surprised when at last they reached Camnipol.