“I didn’t think much of it. He was a Firstblood. She was Cinnae. I could tell it had been a matter of contention, and that they had taken each other’s side against the world. I suppose I admired that, but for me they were simply money. An account that we would take or not take, pay out on or take a loss. Business. When the letter came from Imaniel that they had died and no one was willing to take you, the only thing I asked was whether their account had enough to support you until you were of age. We called you ‘the liability.’ Not by your name. Not ‘the child.’ And now…”
“You’re getting sentimental in your old age,” she said.
“I am,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “I used to be so hard-hearted, and now it seems like a kitten sneezes, and I’m suddenly made of snow. Soft, I am. Old and soft.”
He shook his head. The fire settled in the grate. Cithrin lifted her chin. “May I ask who told you about my plan?”
“No one told me. But I can smell a change in the weather. I called Yardem Hane and put it to him. He said you’d come up with a flavor of… extortion? Is that it?”
“No,” Cithrin said. “Just a way to sell dead priests to the only man in a position to buy. In the coin that matters to him more than coins. Or power.”
“Abduct his father and offer the trade.”
“If it comes to that. There may be a more elegant solution, but it’s good to have a fallback. Have you come to forbid me?”
Komme turned to the fire. The relected fire made him look like an old Dartinae for a moment, eyes glowing and fierce. “Hane argued in favor of your idea. He said… he said he’d seen the shape of your soul, and that keeping you here would bankrupt the world. Break it. And that if I tried to stop you, the death of civilization would be my fault personally.”
“He said that?”
“The bit about the soul, yes,” Komme said. “The rest, I’m paraphrasing. Geder Palliako is a tyrant who has ended kingdoms and crippled races, and you want to do business with him.”
“He’s a small man in a large position, and he’s the only one in the world who can buy what I’m selling,” Cithrin said. And then a moment later, “We’ve just said the same thing.”
“He hates you more deeply than he hates anything. He’s cracked his empire’s back to catch you.”
“At least I’m important to him. And this is how bankers do things, isn’t it? Not armies in the field, but intrigues in back rooms?”
“The way bankers do things is to keep the profit and farm out the risk,” Komme said. “I’m taking the banker’s path. I don’t know what way you’re going. The odds of anything good coming of this are terrible.”
“I agree,” Cithrin said. “But that’s true of taking the safer route too. Mine has better odds than doing nothing, and the stakes are the same.”
“They are, aren’t they?” Komme said, and then lapsed into silence. When he rose, it was with a sigh. He reached down and put his hand on the crown of her head like a father placing a blessing on his child. “Good luck. I’ve had a rich and fascinating life. Seen a dragon. There’s been nothing as interesting as your mind.”
She watched him as he left. He didn’t look back. When the door closed behind him, she took the seat he’d left behind, pressing thoughtful fingertips to her lips and watching the fire dance. He’d said goodbye. Not in any straightforward way, but it was the story under his words. He was the man who, whether he’d meant to or no, had sheltered her all through her life, whose sense of risk and reward had built the financial empire she’d used. He had learned her plan, given his blessing, and said his farewells.
She didn’t know if it was more disturbing that he made the odds that she’d fail or that he thought she should try anyway.
The docks at Carse lay at the bottom of the great pale cliffs. The stairways that clung to the stone face were built of wood, and exposed constantly to the salt air and storm and sun and wind. She’d heard it said that they were rebuilt every ten years or so. The cliff face was dotted with old holes where previous incarnations of the stairs had been. And if an attacker ever came by sea, the steps could be burned, and the invader trapped at the bottom of a wall higher than any siege ladder could hope to reach. Walking down to the ship, Cithrin realized how much the violence of Suddapal and Porte Oliva had changed the way she made sense of the world. When she’d first walked up these steps, the idea of burning them wouldn’t have occurred to her.
Ice covered the dock in a thin sheet. A slack-jawed Jasuru boy in sailor’s canvas walked the length of it with an iron bar, shattering the frozen seawater until the dark wood was white with chips and shards that Cithrin took on faith were surer footing. The little sloop that waited for her looked too small, its draft too shallow. Barriath Kalliam stood on the ladder that reached to the deck, his weight shifting as the ship rose and fell with the motion of the sea. He was speaking to a thin Timzinae woman Cithrin recognized as Shark, one of the commanders of the piratical fleet Barriath had assembled.
On the little deck itself, three figures in oiled skins shifted, talking among themselves. Cithrin reached the ladder and Barriath met her eye. His nod was curt, but not unfriendly. His smile was perhaps a bit self-satisfied. Cithrin wondered whether every man looked at a woman he’d bedded with the same proprietary smugness. She drew her deliberate gaze down his body—neck, shoulders, chest, belly, groin—and lingered there a moment before looking back up. She didn’t feel any particular accomplishment in knowing what the skin looked like beneath his leathers, but she could see the uncertainty in his expression at being viewed as he had viewed her. Uncertainty and also a tentative shade of hope.
“Magistra Cithrin,” Shark said as Cithrin moved past her. Black water shifted beneath them both. “Best of luck to you and yours. Hope you cut their cocks off and shove ’em up their holes.”
“Thank you,” Cithrin said. The Timzinae woman nodded once to her and once to Barriath, then went back to the docks and marched away toward another of the dozen ships tied there.
“Shark’s going to keep order while I’m gone,” Barriath said. “I imagine when I get back she’ll have appropriated the better half of the ships and headed out to sink some trade ships coming back from Far Syramys.”
“Good to know what to expect,” Cithrin said, stepping onto the gently shifting deck. It was small enough that her words carried to the three waiting figures, and one of them laughed. The sound was familiar. Cary pulled back her hood. Her dark hair had a threading of white to it, and her mouth had taken a hardness since Smit’s death in Porte Oliva, but she was still beautiful. More so for being unanticipated.
“What are you doing here?” Cithrin said.
“Learning to play the sailor,” Cary said.
From beneath another of the hoods, Hornet picked up the thought. “You’ll note she didn’t say learning to sail, Magistra. Luck is I’ve spent a few years on the ropes. Lak has too.”
“You couldn’t expect us to stay here,” Cary said. “We’ve no props, no costumes. Half a stage at best. And with Master Kit gone, we’ve lost our Orcus the Demon King, Lord Frost, Annanbelle Coarse, Bakkan the Elder. Anything that takes gravity or makes its humor by undercutting it.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Yardem said.
“They’re looking for you, though,” Cithrin said. “All Antea’s looking for the troupe since Inys landed on you coming back from Hallskar.”
Cary shook her head. “If they’re still looking, it’ll be for an acting company heading for the border. We’re a trade boat from Narinisle to Borja on the last leg of the blue-water trade. Yardem here’s Mikah Haup, tradesman of Lôdi. We’re his hired crew.”
“I won’t pass for a sailor,” Cithrin said.
“I won’t be mistaken for anyone but myself,” Barriath said. “Under Lord Skestinin, I patrolled this stretch of water for the better part of a decade. If it comes to someone being that near to us, we’ll be belowdecks.”
Cithrin considered the ship with a ske
ptical eye. “How much below does this thing have?”
“Enough,” Barriath said. “She’s a fast boat. If there’s trouble, we’ll outrun it. My plan is to find a cove on the north coast about halfway between Asinport and Estinport. There’s a stretch there with no dragon’s roads at all. Then south and west from there until we reach Rivenhalm and Lehrer Palliako. I can act as guide. I haven’t been there myself, but I know the land well enough.”
“That’s your plan,” Cary said. “Mine’s to get my damned Orcus back.”
“What about the others?” Cithrin said.
“They’re below already,” Cary said.
A soft voice rose up from a thin hatch at Cary’s feet. Sandr’s voice. “And we’re stacked like fucking cordwood, I don’t mind saying.”
“We’ll reprovision along the way,” Barriath said. “This is going to be faster than a smuggler’s run if I can manage it.”
Cithrin turned, looking up at the vast cliff face above her. She half expected to see wings silhouetted against the clouds, but there were only gulls and terns. The dragon was elsewhere.
“We should go,” she said. “Before I change my mind about the whole errand.”
Cithrin thought, after her escape from Suddapal to Porte Oliva and then north to Carse, that she’d come to understand the sensations of being aboard ship. She was mistaken. With the sails lifted to catch the winter wind, Barriath’s little boat flew until it almost seemed to rise up from the water, skipping on it like a stone. The dock and Carse and Inys fell away behind them more swiftly than she’d imagined possible, and by morning on the next day, they could see the mouth of the river Wod and the fishing boats that haunted its estuary.
She slept below decks fully clothed, with Hornet and Mikel, Charlit Soon and Sandr, Cary and Lak. Barriath took the days on deck, and Yardem the nights. It felt less like voyaging across the sea than being snowbound in a cabin too small for the people living in it. There were parts of the salt quarter in Porte Oliva where people had lived more densely than this, but they’d had the streets of the city to retreat into. She had nothing. The days were cold, the nights colder. The air belowdecks stank of tar and bodies and grew stale until it seemed like every breath was stolen out of someone else’s mouth.
She should have hated it. She didn’t.
On the third night, the coast to their south began to roughen. Rises became hills. Hills became mountains. Rude, rocky islands rose from the waves like rotting teeth. Cithrin looked for the little winged lizards she remembered from her first voyage to Antea, a lifetime ago it seemed, but there were none. The cold had dropped them into torpor or killed them. She had no way to know which.
After night fell, she stood on the moonlit deck with Yardem as he measured the stars and adjusted the sails. In other circumstances, they would have stopped for the nights and sailed in the safety of day. Instead, their wake glowed behind them, as if the mirror of the aurora shimmering in the northern sky. Cithrin shivered, her fingers and face numbed, and still she was unwilling to leave. Not yet.
“Komme said you saw the shape of my soul,” she said.
“I said so.”
“Was it true?”
“No,” Yardem said. “I lied. He was looking for a reason to hope, and…” the Tralgu shrugged. “It may not have been the right thing, but it seemed wise at the time. Or kind. But since I expected you would do the thing regardless, it seemed better than he have reasons to agree.”
“And you came because you promised Captain Wester.”
“He’d have wanted me to.”
The sea rushed against the wood of the boat. The canvas sails thudded and barked. Sea travel had a way of making everything sound like a whisper and a shout at the same time. Cithrin leaned against the rail and watched the lights shimmer in the vast air above them.
“I’m impressed with how devoted Cary is to Master Kit,” Cithrin said. “All of them, really. It’s a deeper loyalty than I’m used to seeing. But I suppose they’re like family to each other.”
Yardem coughed once.
“What?” Cithrin said.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Tell me.”
“They came for your sake, not Kit’s.”
“Oh.”
Cithrin laughed once in disbelief, then again in embarrassment. She turned to look at the dark water she’d led them to, and the spray hid her tears.
Clara
They trekked through the pass, mountains rising black against the snow and towering above their desperation. Somewhere under the snow a thread of dragon’s jade snaked unseen. Clara couldn’t guess how deep they would have had to dig down under blue ice and hardpack to find it. The winds that the land channeled down upon them bit in the mornings and killed in the night. They did their best, building block huts at the end of each day small enough that the heat of their bodies made a crust of clear ice on the walls and floors. They melted handfuls of snow for fresh water and ate what little hardtack and salted meat remained. Every morning, fewer rose up than had lain down.
Marcus Wester had taken to accompanying Jorey when he reviewed the troops, and though the bank’s mercenary still wore the costume of a servant, his wisdom and confidence lent him stature both in Jorey’s eyes and those of his men. Somewhere along the plodding, freezing, ice-haunted march, they had stopped being the army of Imperial Antea and become merely participants in a shared nightmare.
Clara’s horse died on the fourth day. Forging through a drift of snow deeper than its knees, the animal paused, sighed a weary sigh, hunkered down, and refused to rise. It was the last, and with it gone, there was nothing but to walk or else lie down beside the dead animal and follow its lead. The carts had long been abandoned. Men were even leaving behind their weapons as their strength waned and failed them. There was nothing to fight in these passes. What was bringing them all low couldn’t be cut and wouldn’t bleed.
Clara, for her part, lost herself in the physical misery. At the head of the column, a few men broke the trail, forcing a path through snow light enough to be pushed aside or dense enough to be walked on. It was the hardest, most punishing work of the trail, and which unfortunate was called on changed ten or fifteen times a day. Clara was never called, but Vincen was. And Marcus. And even Kit, their tame priest. The rest of the army followed in that path, two or three walking abreast through an aisle of snow. It made the passage easier, not fighting against a fresh drift with every step.
Time thinned as she walked in a way she’d come to recognize and associate with living on the road. Her numbed feet felt like balancing on stumps. The joints in her hands and hips ached. And still she hauled her trailing foot forward, shifted her weight to it, and began the process again. At first, she heard her own voice in her head saying, One more step. One more step. You can do one more. Just keep doing one more for long enough, and you’ll have made it. The voice quieted in time, but by then her body had the habit of it, and the soldiers drew her along like a living stream. She had neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything but be carried along by it.
Twice, she passed men who had stopped. Both had the vague and confused expression of someone lost despite there being only one path before them and only one direction in which to go. The first she prodded into taking a few steps that seemed to reorient him. With the second, intervening didn’t occur to her at all until she was well past him. She hoped that someone farther back in the line had helped him. That her own exhaustion hadn’t condemned the man to death.
Every night, Master Kit came by, sticking his head into the shelters of snow and ice, assuring them that their progress was good and their strength was enough. It was the trick of the spiders, but for the time that he was there and for several hours after, it seemed plausible that they might survive.
There were no women with the army apart from herself. All the camp followers and tradesmen and fortune-tellers had been scraped off by the rough knife of winter. Nor could she warm her little shelter with her own flesh alone. It
gave her an excuse to bring Vincen in with her. There was neither sex nor the desire for it. She was worn too thin to even consider that, as, she hoped, was he. But bodies offered other comforts than release, and having him there was as near as she could hope to coming home.
“I think we may die here,” she said, her head resting against his chest.
“We won’t,” he said, his voice as empty as habit.
“Might rather we did,” she said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on. Life alone may not be worth the effort.” She was joking, at least in part. She did wonder how much it would take for her dark humor to slide into simple truth.
“Not life,” Vincen said. “Soup.”
“Soup?”
“It’s how I stay strong through this. Life’s too big. Too abstract. Can’t bring myself to want it in particular. Soup, though? A good rich bowl of soup is just a little further down the road somewhere.”
“God,” Clara said. “And a pipe with some fresh leaf.”
“Pie. With Abitha’s cold crust and cheese and beer.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Clara said, shifting against his body as if she might burrow into him for warmth. “Let’s live.”
“I will if you do,” he said, but she was already halfway to sleep. The ice seemed comfortable as a feather bed, and her hands and feet were all terribly far away. No dreams came, only a deep velvet darkness and a sense of terrible weight dragging her down. She woke to the tapping of the camp’s caller on the iced wall. On Wester’s advice Jorey had banned use of the speaking horn until they were someplace less prone to avalanche. She rose, chewed a bit of leather the length of her thumb that was breakfast, and the march began again.
Only today, it grew worse.
The first sign of trouble didn’t catch her attention until much later. The second came when the leaden march passed a widening in the landscape, the mountains stepping a bit apart before they closed ranks again. Jorey and Marcus Wester and half a dozen of the highest-ranking of Jorey’s men stood together at the side of the column. Clara’s footsteps slowed, faltered, and turned.
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