Marcus and Vincen and Clara Kalliam, like the rest of the great army of Antea, abandoned their fire and their tent, their carts and the great majority of the supplies they’d carried, and became ghosts. Silent as the spirits of the dead, they whispered their way to the north, running along deer trails and through thin woods. The air was chill to the point of real cold, but after the pass, it felt like nothing. The thread of dragon’s jade that led from Orsen up into the body of the empire lay somewhere far to their right, unseen. When the last sliver of moon failed them, they went on in darkness without so much as a candle to give them away.
Hours later, the east brightened to charcoal and the figures walking in their silent lines began to have silhouettes. Jorey called the halt, and the army divided. Five groups to the west, to cross the dragon’s road and take shelter separately in the shallow hills and forests of Antea’s southern reaches. Three to stay here and skirt the edges of the Dry Wastes as best they could. One small group with most of the horses to ride north to Camnipol, raising the alarm along the way.
It was in many ways the end of the Lord Marshal’s command. Though Jorey Kalliam would lead the largest of the groups, all would act independently to harass Dannien’s scouts and threaten his supply lines, draw him off the swift path of the dragon’s road into the weeds and dirt of the plains. They would slow the attackers, distract them, and if one group was cornered and slaughtered to a man, there would still be seven more to carry on the job. It was the kind of fighting they did in the Keshet and the wilder edges of Borja, dirty and harsh and thin on honor. It was the kind of battle an army didn’t win so much as indefinitely postpone losing.
None of Jorey’s captains, no matter how noble their blood, objected. That alone, Marcus thought, showed how far Antea had gone down the dragon’s path. No one dreamed of glorious conquest on the field of battle. No one called their sneaking away in the night an act of cowardice. Years in the field and more than half the men who’d marched out to capture Nus dead or scattered back along the path had left the veterans of Antea with fewer illusions about the glories of war than when they’d started.
Which, though Marcus didn’t say it, suggested there was another problem.
They stopped three hours after midday in a shallow valley. Sandstone blocks made a rough wall, the only vestige of some long-vanished structure. There was no snow there, no ice, nothing that could have been made into water. The air had an uncanny salt taste that Marcus had only ever found near the Dry Wastes. But though they were close, these weren’t the wastes.
Jorey’s personal force was a hundred and fifty men, five horses, and his mother. Of the three that had stayed on the east side of the jade road, it had gone farthest north. Even if Dannien wheeled his forces and quick-marched after them—which would have been a first-campaign level of error—they wouldn’t reach here in twice the time Jorey had. The army might be hard to stop, but at the price of speed.
Marcus found Kit on the sun-soaked side of the wall. The actor had grown thinner since they’d left Carse. They all had. His cheekbones seemed ready to cut through his olive skin, and his wiry hair haloed him in brown and grey. He lifted an exhausted hand to Marcus.
“Well,” Marcus said, sitting beside the man. “That was unpleasant.”
“I found it less enjoyable than I expected,” Kit agreed. “And I don’t think my expectations were particularly high. I must admit, I was surprised that our little sidestep was effective.”
“There are advantages to having a name that kings whisper to scare their princes at night. Great warriors don’t traditionally turn tail and sneak out in the dark before a battle. Add to that I challenged him, and he thought we had more men than we did. He believed he’d win, but I didn’t let him think I agreed quite so much.” Marcus laughed and rested his head against the gritty stone. “I won’t be able to pull the trick again.”
Kit made a noise of appreciation deep in his throat and went silent. Marcus shifted the scabbard, unslung it awkwardly, and put it on the ground at his side.
“Noticed something odd. When the forces split, no one was talking about the greater glory of the goddess or how we were all bringing truth to the unwashed or any of that.”
“I suppose I hadn’t paid attention to that,” Kit said.
“No, they dropped their honor-and-glory talk in favor of something practical pretty damned fast. Leaves me wondering.” He looked over at his old friend and companion. They had come through terrible places together, he and Kit. He didn’t want to go on, but it was the job. “Get the feeling you may have been improvising some lines.”
“I think you’re asking if I played the priest of the goddess the whole journey. Have I understood you?”
“Have.”
“I could not,” Kit whispered. “I like to think I tried as best I could. I didn’t reveal who we truly are or our relationship to Cithrin or the bank. Or Palliako, for that. I didn’t lay bare the truth of what the spiders are or how these men’s lives were spent on a deceit. But there are things I cannot agree to do.”
“If you couldn’t stand lying to them, the time to say that would have been before we left Carse. We were counting on you. And you don’t get to change that horse midstream.”
“Them? It wasn’t them. It was me.”
“Don’t know what that means, Kit.”
“Each of them, I spoke to each of them every… I don’t know. Two days? Three? I started in the mornings and I played my part until it was time to sleep again. Even in the pass. Even then. They heard me a bit. On occasion. I was never free of my voice.”
“You’re not getting clearer.”
“I began to believe again,” Kit said. “I said that the goddess would save us. That we would win through. That all would be well, and I found myself taking real comfort in it. Once I saw that, I felt I had to change. Give them encouragement, but not… not the kind I had been giving.”
Marcus felt a little twist in his belly. A drop of horror in his sea of weariness. “Knowing what you know and seeing what you’ve seen, you fell back into believing in the spider goddess?”
Kit was silent for a long moment. A breath of wind stirred the grit and dirt. Salt and copper haunted the back of Marcus’s tongue.
“I don’t believe we are fighting cynics, Marcus. When I see my old brothers, I don’t see men manipulating innocents. I see men who have listened to their own stories until who they might have been was eaten away to nothing. I think they wear the goddess like a blindfold and swing their knives on faith. I believe I am as vulnerable to the power of my voice as anyone else, and I felt myself falling prey to the words I spoke. I’m sure that what I knew protected me, but it would wear away given time. Here and now, I want you to see how badly I wish the world free of these things. I hope you understand that I have been fighting against this power longer than anyone else I know. Longer than most of you even knew this danger existed.”
“I understand.”
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I hope I have managed to bring those two together as nearly as I could, and if I have, it was hard work with terrible prices paid along the way. I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but taking apart what I actually am and what I only believe myself to be?”
“Yeah. All right,” Marcus said.
“I would rather die than that,” Kit said.
“If you turned back into one of them, I’d kill you.”
Kit’s eyes went a little wider, his face paled under the leather and burn of his cheeks. The truth of what Marcus said carried a deeper weight than the glib way he’d said it. No one but Kit and his twice-damned spiders would have heard it.
“Thank you,” Kit said. “I appreciate that.”
Marcus didn’t have the advantage of the spiders, but he was fairly certain Kit wasn’t lying.
Cithrin
Years before, in another lifetime, Cithrin had been part of a car
avan attacked by robbers. They’d been stopped by a tree across the dragon’s jade of the road. Before they could clear it, bandits had come from the sides and behind. The plan Cithrin hatched now wasn’t precisely the same but neither was it so very different. There were only a few scraps of information she needed.
The inn sat at the intersection of a dirt track and the dragon’s road. Yardem had done the negotiations with the keep, pretending to have less coin than they actually had and haggling for a place in the stables where they would be seen by fewer people. The grooms and stable hands, he was more open with, passing them enough silver that most of them found their way to the common rooms here or else other places nearby.
For the players, it was like coming home. With the exception of Lak, who had never been touring with Cary and Master Kit and the others, the stables of inns and taprooms were nearly like a mother’s hearth. Hornet and Mikel immediately made friends with the horses, cooing and passing them bits of dried apple. Charlit Soon and Cary scouted the place, finding where they could all sit in relative warmth and privacy, and also where the women could sleep apart from the men and so lower the chance of a local boy’s taking the wrong idea. Yardem took it all with the same stoic amusement that seemed to follow him like a cloud. Only Barriath seemed out of place.
Well, Barriath and her.
Cithrin had to keep out of sight. She’d spent the whole journey down from the icy coast to Rivenhalm wrapped in a colorless woolen cloak and hood, trying not to be noticeable and feeling as unobtrusive as blood on a wedding dress. A half-Cinnae woman in Antea would suggest only one name to the townsfolk. Cithrin bel Sarcour was, after all, the slut and daughter of lies who’d humiliated the Lord Regent and aided the filthy Timzinae in their plots against the empire. It gave her more attention than any banker would want. Her best defense was that a woman of that stature and power would never be so stupid as to travel the back roads with only a handful of actors, a single guard, and an exile and traitor whom Geder had ordered killed if found inside his borders. If she had been able to trust the work to anyone else, she wouldn’t have come.
Except that wasn’t true. This was better than sitting quietly in Carse, waiting for word to come. And if it was a problem, at least it was hers. It was better to be damned for what she was.
Charlit Soon’s giggle came from the yard, and a boy’s rough voice trying to be deeper than it was. The other players went quiet, holding their conversation until they knew the results of her mission. She squealed and laughed and then her shadow came through the stable door alone. The boy’s footsteps were almost too quiet to hear, even before he retreated.
Charlit’s round face glowed.
“He’s at his holding,” she said. “Apparently Lord Lehrer Palliako isn’t what you’d call a fixture at court, even if his son does run it.”
“Could have told you that,” Barriath said, with a scowl. “Wait. I did tell you that. More than once.”
“You didn’t say he was at home just now,” Sandr pointed out with feigned mildness. The two men had been needling each other since landfall in the north. Cithrin had a sense that she didn’t want to examine why the pair got on so poorly.
“And,” Charlit Soon said, lifting her chin, “he’s due to visit a particular set of farms tomorrow. I even have directions to the road he goes down to reach them.”
“Well done,” Cary said, then turned to Cithrin. “You know what you want to do, then?”
In the stall behind them, a thin, shaggy horse sighed and shifted, scratching himself against the wooden posts. The straw around her feet skittered in the little breeze. The others were looking at her, waiting.
“I know what I want to try,” she said.
The next day, they went out. Horses were too expensive to take without drawing attention, but the march wasn’t long, and the landscape welcomed them. The trees outside Rivenhalm were still bare from the winter, but warm winds had almost finished melting the snow. Only the deep shadows still held pale and dirty lumps, half snow and half ice, and all surrendering to the coming springtime. Pale-green sprouts were pushing their way up from the dark earth. Gravel and mud made a raised roadway, and a slope to the north came to a ditch already running with brown, murky water. Everything smelled of rich soil and the coming spring. Rivenhalm’s farmland to the west of the holding lay on a plain, but Cithrin and the others didn’t go so far as to see them. They made their little camp in among the trees on a long straight stretch, waiting. The low, white sky softened the sunlight, leaving everything cool and nearly shadowless. Everything else she’d done, now she was trying her hand at banditry.
When she was a child, Magister Imaniel had talked to her about the placing of negotiations. The architecture that surrounded a conversation had the power to shape it, he’d said. That was why the bank’s offices were kept so modest. When someone came to place a deposit, everything around them lowered their expectation of a return. When the bank was preparing to put out coin as an investment, it was better done at a cathedral or a palace or a wide open square in the city’s center. Simply by making the space in which the trade took place wide and large, the bank set the scale for the money involved.
As the sun sailed unseen through the sky, lighting the clouds with pale fire, she wondered what he would make of this empty stretch of road, the bone-bare trees spreading out all around, and the road that reached out toward the horizon. It was a humble place, without even the dignity of the dragon’s jade. And it was lonely. She had to take control of Geder’s father, one way or another. And then she had to take control of Geder. She strained her attention toward the vanishing edge of the road, willing her prey to appear and dreading it.
Cary struck up a song, her voice low and murmuring so that the melody wouldn’t give them away. Yardem throbbed a bass accompaniment. The wood itself seemed to take up the song. For a time, it was beautiful.
The distant echo of hoofbeats stopped them, and in the distance three figures appeared, all on horseback. Cithrin, back among the trees at the roadside, scowled. She’d assumed Lehrer Palliako would travel in a carriage. It was possible that the man she wanted wasn’t in the party now approaching. Or perhaps he was and would have a much easier path to escape should it come to violence. Either scenario carried its own difficulties.
Her breath came faster and shallow as the riders approached. Two men, one in a wide, shaggy coat, the other in light leather armor such as a guard or huntsman might wear. The third a woman in plain canvas and patched wool.
Cithrin narrowed her eyes, trying to better see the man in the shaggy coat. He was older, that was sure. The hair that showed at the edges of his leather hat was white. The horse he rode held itself tall and proud. It was hard to think that the father of the Lord Regent would go about his holding in such practical, workmanlike fashion. It was also hard to think that this would be anyone else.
Her heart in her throat, Cithrin lifted her hand to Yardem. He nodded and lifted his voice in a call that sounded like a crow calling twice, and then again three times. A moment later, another false crow came back twice and then once. The others set back along the road were ready. She should have brought more soldiers. Except that soldiers could hardly help looking like soldiers, and actors could better pass unnoticed. Trade-offs. Everything was trade-offs. Always and forever.
Cithrin stepped out from the trees, walking with her weight low in her hips the way Cary had taught her. Cary, Yardem, Sandr, and Lak followed. The hoofbeats shifted, slowed. Yardem and the three players stood behind her, their bodies blocking the way forward at a hundred feet behind, and Barriath and the others did the same. Cithrin’s belly was tighter than knots, and she wished she’d thought to bring a skin of wine. Or something stronger.
She walked alone toward the riders, and the riders stopped before she reached them. Close up, there was no question that this was Geder’s father. They had similar eyes, and the way the old man’s shoulders angled into his thick neck was a prediction of how Geder Palliako would age.
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“Lord Palliako,” she said, making her curtsy. “I assume I have the honor of addressing the Viscount of Rivenhalm?”
She braced herself for his reply, ready to leap aside if he charged, or fall back if he drew his sword. The seconds lasted hours.
“You have me at a disadvantage, miss,” the elder Palliako said. “I don’t recall having met, and I would think even at my age, I’d recall a lovely young woman like yourself.”
There was no fear in his voice. His male companion and, Cithrin had to believe, guard placed a hand on the pommel of his sword. The woman in the patched cloak had already drawn a long, vicious-looking knife. Cithrin smiled. When she’d pictured this conversation, it had happened in a carriage where it felt much less like shouting. But here she was, and nothing to be done about it.
“I am an acquaintance of your son’s,” she said. And then a moment later, “I think you’ll have heard of me. I mean you no harm. I’ve come to talk with you. I have an offer I’d like to present.”
The old man blinked. It took only a few seconds for him to understand what this half-Cinnae woman in his road was saying. Who she was, and what her presence implied.
“You’re certain this isn’t an abduction?” the older man said, turning his horse a few degrees. “Because, just between us, it looks a bit like an abduction.”
Well, and it might have been if he’d ridden in a damned carriage. If he left the road, leapt the filthy ditch, and lit out among the trees, she’d never find him again. She stepped to the side of the road and motioned to the others. Yardem, understanding the tactics of the situation, moved first, and the others followed him. None of them drew a weapon. Lehrer Palliako’s way forward was clear, but the man didn’t spur his horse.
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