“I am making my report to the holding company now. My primary finding is that what you have done here was honestly intended to be in the interests of the bank as a whole. We are, unfortunately, obligated to a length of contract in Porte Oliva that doesn’t match what we’d like, but I know you were doing the best you could. And while some aspects of your behavior were certainly outside the law, I see no advantage to seeking any legal redress.”
“He means we got away with it?” Marcus asked.
“He does,” Cithrin said.
“Good to know.”
Paerin tapped his fingertips against the top of the desk, the deep lines of a frown marking his high forehead.
“I don’t want to be forward, and I can’t, of course, make any guarantees,” he said, “but there may be a position for a woman with your talents in Carse. I would need to discuss it with Komme Medean and some of the other directors. But if you would like to make a career as a banker, I think you could find a start there.”
You still have the option of walking away, Marcus had said less than hour earlier. She still did. It was time to burn that hope.
“I would prefer to have a start here,” Cithrin said. “Have you considered my proposal?”
Paerin Clark looked at her blankly. Then, embarrassed for her, he nodded.
“Yes, that. No. We will be putting a recognized member of the bank in charge of the branch until it can be dissolved. Keeping you in your present position isn’t possible.”
Marcus chuckled.
“Does it make me a bad man that I was hoping he would say that?” he asked.
Cithrin ignored him. When she spoke, she sat straight and looked the auditor in the eye.
“You’ve overlooked something, sir. There’s a record book from Vanai that isn’t among these. It’s an old one, though. It doesn’t touch directly on your audit.”
Paerin Clark shifted his chair to face her. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“It is the book that records my status as ward of the bank,” Cithrin said. “It shows my legal age, and the date upon which I can begin to sign legally binding contracts. That would be next summer.”
“I don’t see how that—”
Cithrin gestured to the books, the piles of paper and parchment, the entire mechanism of her bank.
“None of these contracts is legal,” she said. “I am not legally permitted to enter into any agreement. I’m ten months too young.”
Paerin Clark’s expression was the same bland smile he’d worn the first day he’d come. It might only have been her imagination that he was a shade paler. Cithin swallowed to loosen the knot in her throat.
“If the information in that book becomes public,” she said, “the bank will have to resort to direct appeal to the governor to either enforce the contracts anyway or reclaim the sums that were given out. I’ve met the governor, and I think that he is unlikely to take money away from his citizens to give to a bank that’s in a hurry to abandon his city.”
“And the book in question is where?” Paerin Clark asked.
“In a strongbox deposited with the governor under my name privately and separately from the bank. And the key to the box is in the keeping of a man with no incentive to see the bank succeed here. If I tell him what it unlocks, you can burn all these papers to light your cookfires.”
“You’re bluffing. If this comes out, you’re guilty of forgery, theft. Misrepresentation. You’ll be in gaol for the rest of your life, and all we’ll lose is money.”
“I can get her out of here,” Marcus said. “A city’s complement of queensmen half incapacitated from laughing at you? I can get her out of Birancour and in a decent house by midwinter.”
“We are the Medean bank,” Paerin Clark said. “You can’t outrun us.”
“I’m Marcus Wester. I’ve killed kings, and I’m lousy at bluffing. Threaten her again, and—”
“Stop it, both of you,” Cithrin said. “Here’s my offer. Keep the branch as it is, but install a notary from the holding company. We say it’s to help with the workload. I’m the face and voice, but the notary oversees all the agreements.”
“And when I refuse?”
She wanted a drink. She wanted a warm bed and man’s arms around her. She wanted to know for certain that she was doing the right thing.
“I burn this branch to the ground,” she said.
The world balanced on the edge of a blade. The auditor closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair. Ah well, Cithrin thought. Life as a fugitive wasn’t so bad last winter. At least this time I can wear my own clothes. Paerin Clark opened his eyes.
“You sign nothing,” he said. “All agreements are signed by the notary and the notary alone. Negotiations don’t happen without the notary present. If you’re overruled, you accept it. Control rests with the holding company. You’re a figurehead. Nothing more.”
“I can live with that,” she said. And also, unspoken: Until I can change it, I can live with that.
“And you return the missing book with evidence of your age to me. Before I leave the city.”
“No,” Marcus said. “She gives you that, she’s got no purchase. You could go back on everything, and she’d have nothing.”
“She’ll have to trust me.”
Cithrin swallowed. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to sing.
She nodded. Paerin Clark was still for a long moment, then he picked up the papers he’d been writing, sighed, and ripped them into small squares.
“It seems I have a somewhat different report to write,” he said, smiling wryly. “Congratulations on your new bank, Magistra.”
Geder
The funeral rites of Phelia Maas were somewhat overshadowed by the execution of her husband. Geder, given the choice, had opted for the execution, as had the majority of the great names at court. King Simeon’s throne sat on a raised dais. Aster sat beside him in a smaller chair of the same design. King and prince both wore black ermine. Then there was the broad expanse of the chamber, Feldin Maas kneeling in its center. His ankles and wrists were bound with wire, and even from the gallery behind the woven rope, Geder could see the bruises on the man’s legs and the long black scabs across his back. Ten executioners stood in a rough circle around the prisoner. Their masks were steel and made to look like snarling animals, and their blades were dull and rusted.
A single drum beat out its dry call. It was the only sound apart from some idiot whispering at the back the crowd. Geder tried to ignore the people and focus on the spectacle. Even though he’d arrived late, the assembled nobles had made room for him, so he had an excellent view just at the edge of the gallery. Dawson Kalliam and his two sons stood next to him. Geder was wearing his black leather cloak from Vanai, but the cut of it was all wrong now. His body had changed shape over the summer, and it hung loose on him. He wished he’d thought to get it recut. Everyone who wasn’t watching Feldin Maas die seemed to be looking at him.
King Simeon, gray in the face and severe, lifted his arm. The drum went silent. The mass of people in all three levels of the gallery took in their breath. Even the idiot at the back stopped talking.
“You have the courtesy of a final statement, traitor,” the king said.
Feldin Maas shook his head slowly. No.
The king’s arm fell. The executioners moved in, each man sinking the point of his blade hard into the man’s flesh. Geder had been led to believe that the blades were fairly dull, and the force each of the killers used reinforced the idea. Maas cried out once, but only once. When the executioners stood back, he lay in a spreading pool of blood, the ten blades sticking out of his body. The assembly around him let its breath out with a sound like wind through trees.
King Simeon stood. Behind him, Prince Aster looked like a statue of himself carved from pale stone. Geder wondered what it would be like for a boy just past his ninth naming day to know that a grown man had been plotting to kill him and then watch the man die brutally.