“What will you do now?” she said.
Kit took a deep breath and let it out slowly before turning away from the song.
“I expect we’ll stay here for the time being. I don’t think Cary’s quite ready to take on the full burden of Opal’s roles, but by the end of the summer, with some rehearsal and serious work, I expect she will be. Between the armies of Vanai and now Opal, the company’s a bit thinner than I like. I hope we’ll be able to recruit a few good people. I’ve found port cities often collect itinerant actors.”
Cithrin nodded. Kit waited for her to speak, and when she didn’t, went on.
“Besides which, I find myself rather fascinated by your Captain Wester.”
“He’s not my Captain Wester,” Cithrin said. “He’s made it perfectly clear that he’s his own Captain Wester.”
“Has he, then? I stand corrected,” Master Kit said. The church song swelled, what could have been a hundred voices rising and falling, throbbing against each other until it seemed like some other voice threatened to speak through them. God whispering. It seemed to pull Master Kit’s attention, but when he spoke he hadn’t lost the conversation’s thread. “I believe the dragons left a legacy in this world that is… destructive. Corrosive by nature, and doomed to cause pain. Unchecked, it will eat the world. Wester is one of the few people I’ve met who I thought might stand against it.”
“Because he’s so stubborn?” Cithrin asked, trying to make it a joke.
“Yes, because of that,” Master Kit said. “And, I suppose, the shape of his soul.”
“He was a general in Northcoast a long time ago,” Cithrin said. “Something happened to his wife, I think.”
“He led Prince Springmere’s army in the succession. There were battles against the armies of Lady Tracian that should have been lost, but Captain Wester won them.”
“Wodford and Gradis,” Cithrin said. “But people also talk about… Ellis?”
“Yes. The fields of Ellis. They say it was the worst battle in the war, that no one wanted it and no one could back down. The story is he was so important that the prince grew afraid that another of the pretenders might seduce his loyalty. Convince him to change sides. Springmere had his family killed and his rival implicated. The captain’s wife and daughter died in front of him, and badly even as these things go.”
“Oh,” Cithrin said. “What happened to Springmere? I know he lost the succession, but…”
“Our friend Marcus found out what had really happened, took his revenge, and then dropped out of history. I think most people assumed he died. In my experience, the worst thing that can happen to a man in that position is that he live long enough to see how little vengeance leaves after it. I don’t think he has many illusions left to him, which is why he’s…” Master Kit shook himself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wander off like that. Getting old, I think. I had wanted to say again that I’m sorry for what happened, and I am deeply committed to seeing that it not happen again.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“I would also like to offer whatever help I can in seeing you safely to Carse. I feel we owe you more than a day’s free labor. A bit odd, I know, but I think pretending to be soldiers for so long left us all with a bit of the camaraderie of the sword.”
Cithrin nodded, but she felt her brow furrow even before she knew quite why. The church song sank in a final, conclusive cadence, and silence seemed to flow into the world like a wave. Seagulls looped through the high air, yellow beaks and steady, unflapping wings.
“Why do you apologize for everything you say?” she asked.
Master Kit turned to her, bushy eyebrows hoisted.
“I wasn’t aware that I did,” he said.
“You just did it again,” Cithrin said. “You never say anything straight out. It’s all I believe this or I’ve found that. You never say, The sun rises in the morning. It’s always, I think the sun rises in the morning. It’s like you’re trying not to promise anything.”
Master Kit went sober. His dark eyes considered her. Cithrin felt a chill run down her spine, but it wasn’t fear. It was like being on the edge of finding something that she’d only guessed was there. Master Kit rubbed a palm across his chin. The sound was soft and intimate and utterly mundane.
“I’m surprised you noticed that,” he said, then smiled at having done it again. “I have a talent for being believed, and I’ve found it to be problematic. I suppose I’ve adopted habits to soften the effect, and so I try not to assert things unless I’m certain of them. Absolutely certain, I mean. I’m often surprised by how little I’m absolutely certain of.”
“That’s an odd choice,” Cithrin said.
“And it encourages me to take myself lightly,” Master Kit said. “I find a certain value in lightness.”
“I wish I could,” she said. The despair in her voice surprised her, and then she was weeping.
The actor blinked, his arms shifting uncertainly, and Cithrin stood in the open street embarrassed by her own sobbing, but powerless to stop. Master Kit wrapped an arm around her and led her forward to the steps of the church. His cloak was cheap wool, rough and still smelling of lanolin. He draped it over her shoulders. She leaned forward, her head on her knees. She felt the fear and the sorrow, but only at a distance. But the landslide had begun, and there was nothing she could do now but let it go. Master Kit placed his hand on her back, just between her shoulder blades, and rubbed gently, like a man soothing a baby. After a while, the sobs grew less violent. The tears dried. Cithrin eventually found her voice.
“I can’t do this,” she said. How many thousand times had she told herself that since the day Besel died? But always to herself. This was the first time she’d said the words aloud to anyone. They tasted sour. “I can’t do this.”
Master Kit took his arm back, but still shared his rough, cheap cloak. A few of the people walking by stared, but most ignored them. The old actor’s skin smelled like a spice shop. Cithrin wanted to curl up there on the cold stone steps, sleep, and never wake up.
“You can,” Master Kit said.
“No, I—”
“Cithrin, stop. Listen to my voice,” Master Kit said.
Cithrin turned. He looked older than she remembered him, and it took a moment to realize it was because he wasn’t smiling, even in the corner of his eyes. There were pouches under his eyes. His jowls sagged, and the stubble of his beard was more white than black. Cithrin waited.
“You can do this,” he said. “No, just listen to me. You can do this.”
“You mean you think that I can,” she said. “Or you expect that I will.”
“No. I meant what I said. You can do this.”
Something in the back of Cithrin’s mind shifted. Something in her blood altered, like the surface of a pond rippling when a fish has passed too close beneath it. The overwhelming sorrow was still there, the fear that she would fail, the sense of being at the mercy of a wild and violent world. None of it went away. Only with it, there was something else. Hardly brighter than a firefly in the darkness of her mind, there was a new thought: Perhaps.
Cithrin rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and shook her head. The sun had shifted farther and faster than she’d expected. She didn’t know how long ago they’d left the new rooms.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“I felt I owed it to you,” Master Kit said. He seemed tired.
“Should we go back?”
“If you’re ready, I think we should.”
Evening came later than Cithrin expected, another sign that winter was beginning to lose its grip. Yardem Hane sat on the floor, his huge legs crossed, and ate rice and fish from a plate. Captain Wester paced.
“If we pick the wrong ship,” the captain said, “they’ll murder us, throw our bodies to the sharks, and spend the rest of their lives living high in some port in Far Syramys or Lyoneia. But we’d only have the customs house here and the one in Carse to go past. On the road, we might h
ave to weather half a dozen tax collectors.”
Cithrin looked at her own plate of fish, her belly too knotted to eat. Every word Wester said made it worse.
“We could backtrack,” Yardem said. “Go to the Free Cities, and north from there. Or back to Vanai, for that.”
“Without a caravan to hide in?” Marcus said.
The Tralgu shrugged, conceding the point. Behind the constant motion of the captain’s legs, the wax-sealed books of the Vanai bank glowed in the candlelight. Cithrin’s anxiety circled back to them, images of cracked seal and rotting leather spines dancing through her head like a nightmare that wouldn’t fade.
“We could buy a fishing boat,” Yardem said. “Sail it ourselves. Hug the coast.”
“Fighting off pirates with our forceful personalities?” Marcus said. “Cabral is half rotten with free ships stealing the trade they can, and King Sephan isn’t about to stop them.”
“No good options,” Yardem said.
“None. And weeks still before we can take the bad ones,” Marcus said.
Cithrin put her plate on the ground and walked past Captain Wester. She took the topmost of the books, looked around the dim, gold-lit room, and found the short blade Yardem had used to carve cheese at midday. The blade was shining clean.
“What are you doing?” Marcus asked.
“I can’t choose the right ship,” Cithrin said, “or the right path, or a caravan to hide in. But I can see that the books aren’t wet, so I’m doing that.”
“We’ll just have to seal them again,” Marcus said, and Cithrin ignored him. The wax was as thick as her thumb, and came off in stubborn chunks. A layer of cloth beneath it gave way to a softer inner layer of wax, and then parchment wrapping. The book hidden inside it all could have been fresh from Magister Imaniel’s desk. Cithrin opened it, and the pages hissed against each other. The familiar marks of Magister Imaniel’s handwriting were like a memory from childhood, and Cithrin almost wept again seeing them. Her fingers traced sums and notations, balances, transactions, details of contract and return rate. Magister Imaniel’s signature and the brown, cracked blood of his thumb. She let them wash over her, familiar and foreign at the same time. Here was the deposit the bank had taken from the bakers’ guild, and there in blue ink, a record of the payments made as recompense, month by month, for the years they’d held the money. She turned the page. Here was the record of loss on shipping insurance from the year that the storms had come up from Lyoneia later than ever before. The sums shocked her. She hadn’t guessed that the loss had been so profound. She closed the book, took her blade, and found another. Marcus and Yardem were still talking, but they could have been in another city for all it mattered to her.
The next book was older, and she followed the history of the bank in it, from the letters of foundation that began it through the years of transactions, almost until the day she’d left. The history of Vanai written in numbers and ciphered notes. And there, in red, a small notation of Cithrin bel Sarcour accepted as ward of the Medean bank until she reached legal age and took over the balance of her parents’ deposits, less the costs of keeping her. There were as many words spent on a grain shipment or investment in a brewery. The death of her parents, the beginning of the only life she’d known, all on a single line.
She got another book.
Marcus stopped talking, ate his dinner, and curled up on the cot. The half moon rose. Cithrin traced the history of the bank like she was reading old letters sent from home. Wax and cloth and parchment mounded around her like wrapping paper. Growing in the back of her mind, almost forgotten in the fascination of old ink and dusty paper, was a sense of possibility. Not confidence—not yet—but its precursor.
It was only when Yardem woke her by taking the leather-bound book from her hand that she realized that—for the first time since Opal—she’d slept dreamless through the night.
Dawson
Rough, plank-board ladders and improvised stairways lined the sides of the Division, clinging to the ancient ruins like lichen to a stone. High above, the great bridges spanned the gap with stone and steel and dragon’s jade: Silver Bridge, Autumn Bridge, Stone Bridge, and almost lost in the haze the Prisoner’s Span hung with cages and straps. Lower, where the sides came close enough, rope lines swung and rotted in the air. Between them the history of the city lay bare, each stratum showing an age and empire on which the one above had been founded.
Dawson, wrapped in a simple brown cloak, could have passed for a scavenger from the midden at the Division’s base or a smuggler making his way to the obscure underground passages that laced Camnipol’s foundation. Vincen Coe might have been his conspirator or his son. The morning frost kept their footsteps slow. The smell of the rising air was nauseating—sewage, horse manure, rotting food, the bodies of animals and of men barely better than animals.
Dawson found the archway. Ancient, flaking stone shaped in classic form, an inscription eroded to illegibility but not yet washed away. Within, the darkness was absolute.
“I don’t like this, my lord,” the huntsman said.
“You don’t need to,” Dawson said, and walked proudly into the gloom.
Winter’s hand still pressed on Camnipol, but its power was breaking. The underground was alive with tiny sounds: the chitter of the first insects of the coming spring, the sharp trickle of thaw streams, and the soft breath of the land itself preparing to wake itself again into green spring. It would be weeks yet, and then it would seem to come overnight. It occurred to Dawson as he paused in a wide, vaulted tile of an abandoned bathing chamber, how many things followed that same pattern. The seemingly endless stasis followed by a few small signs, and then sudden catastrophic change. He pulled the letter from his pocket and leaned back toward Coe to read it again in the torchlight. Canl Daskellin had written that one of the doorways would be marked with a square. Dawson squinted into the darkness. Perhaps Daskellin had a younger man’s eyes…
“Here, my lord,” Coe said, and Dawson grunted. Now that it was pointed out, the mark was clear enough. Dawson walked down the short, sloping hall that turned into a stairway.
“No guards yet,” Dawson said.
“There are, sir,” Coe said. “We’ve passed three. Two archers and one manning a deadfall.”
“Well hidden, then.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You don’t sound reassured.”
The huntsman didn’t answer. The hall met a huge stone, its surface polished and glazed so well that the torchlight seemed to double. Dawson followed his shadow around a slow curve until an answering light appeared. Dragon’s jade carved into unbreakable pillars held up a low ceiling. A dozen candles filled the dusty air with soft light. And there, sitting in a carved round, was Canl Daskellin with Dawson’s old acquaintance Odderd Faskellan on his left and a pale Firstblood man Dawson didn’t recognize on his right.
“Dawson!” Canl said. “I was beginning to worry.”
“No need,” Dawson said, waving Vincen Coe back toward the shadows. “I’m only pleased I was in the city. I’d hoped to spend part of the year in Osterling Fells.”
“Next year,” Odderd said. “God willing, we’ll all be back to normal next year. Though with this latest news…”
“There’s news, then?” Dawson said.
Canl Daskellin gestured to the seat across from him, and Dawson lowered himself into it. The pale man smiled politely.
“I don’t think we know each other,” Dawson said to the smile.
“Dawson Kalliam, Baron of Osterling Fells,” Daskellin said with a grin of his own. “May I introduce the solution to our problems. This is Paerin Clark.”
“The pleasure is mine, Baron Osterling,” the pale man said. His voice had the slushy accent of Northcoast. Dawson felt the small hairs on his arm rise. The man had no title. He wasn’t Antean. And yet he was here.
“What’s the news,” Dawson said. “And how does our new friend here enter into it?”
“He’s married to
the youngest daughter of Komme Medean,” Odderd said. “He lives in Northcoast. Carse.”
“I wasn’t aware we had business with the Medean bank,” Dawson said.
“Issandrian knows what we’ve been doing,” Daskellin said. “Not only Vanai. The men we placed to stir trouble with the farmers, the move to strip Feldin Maas of his southern holdings. Everything.”
Dawson waved the words away as if they were gnats. He was more concerned that this banker appeared to know it all as well. Issandrian would have discovered their traps and schemes eventually.
“He’s petitioned King Simeon to sponsor games,” Odderd said. “Issandrian and Klin and Maas, and half a dozen more besides. They’re putting up the coin for it. Cleaning out the stadium. Hiring show fighters and horesemen. Borjan long archers. Cunning men. It’s supposed to be a celebration for Prince Aster.”
“It’s a fighting force inside the walls of Camnipol,” Canl Daskellin said.
“It’s a bluff a child could see through,” Dawson said. “If it came to insurrection, Issandrian would lose. He doesn’t have the men or the money to back a war.”
“Ah,” the banker said.
Dawson lifted his chin like a forest animal scenting smoke. Canl Daskellin took a handful of folded paper from the seat beside him and held them out to Dawson. The paper was cheap, the handwriting plain and unadorned. Copies, then, of some more prestigious correspondence. Dawson squinted. The dim light set the words swimming, but with a little concentration he could make them out clearly enough. I send the best wishes to you and your family and so on. Our mutual great-aunt, Ekarina Sakiallin, Baroness of the noble lands of Sirinae…
“Sirinae,” Dawson said. “That’s in Asterilhold.”
“Our friend Feldin Maas has family in the court,” Odderd said. “Part of making peace after the Treaty of Astersan was a fashion for strategic marriages. It’s three generations back now, but the ties are still there. Maas has been sending letters to a dozen of his cousins that we know of. There may be others we didn’t intercept.”
Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse Page 77