“You have something to say?”
Yardem sighed.
“If she were less like Meriam, you’d have stayed,” Yardem said.
The dirty song went to a new verse, speculating on the sex life of Dartinae and Cinnae. Or glow-worms and maggots, as the lyrics put it. Marcus shot an annoyed glance at the singer. The tightness in his jaw was spreading down his neck and between his shoulder blades. Yardem put down his cider.
“If it had been a man driving that cart,” Yardem said. “Or an older woman. Someone who looked less like Alys or wasn’t the age Meriam would have been, you would have taken contract from them.”
Marcus coughed out a laugh. The singer took a breath, preparing to launch into another verse. Marcus stood.
“You! Enough of that. There’s grown men here trying to think.”
The sailor’s face clouded.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“The man telling you that’s enough,” Marcus said.
The sailor sneered, then blinked at something in Marcus’s expression, flushed red, and sat down, his back toward Marcus and Yardem. Marcus turned back to his second.
“That cart is going to pull blades and blood to it, and we both know it,” Marcus said softly. “That much wealth in one place is a call to murder. Now you’re telling me that standing in front of it’s the right thing?”
“No, sir. Damned foolish, sir,” Yardem said. “Only you’d have done it.”
Marcus shook his head. In his memory, Meriam reached out from the flames. He took her dying body in his arms. He could smell the burning hair, the skin. He felt her relax against him and remembered thinking that she was saved, that she was safe, and then realizing what the softness in her joints really meant. He didn’t know anymore if it was the true memory of the events or his dreams.
Cithrin bel Sarcour. He pictured her cart. Pictured the middle-aged Firstblood tin hauler in her place. Or the ’van master and his wife. Or Master Kit and Opal. Anyone besides the girl herself.
He rubbed his eyes until false colors bloomed in front of him. The sea murmured. The sharp apple smell of his cider cut through the cold air. The anger in his chest collapsed, nothing more than paper armor after all, and he said something obscene.
“Should I go find her, sir?”
“We better had,” Marcus said, dropping the coins for their drinks on the table. “Before she does something dangerous.”
Geder
Geder might have found it more difficult to hide his subterfuge if his failure hadn’t been assumed from the start. Instead, he and his half-loyal soldiers limped back into the city, gave their thin reports, and were dismissed. Geder returned to the weak stream of his duties; enforcing taxes, arresting loyalists, and generally harassing the people of Vanai in the name of Alan Klin.
“I can’t pay this,” the old Timzinae said, looking up from the taxation order. “The prince had us all pay twice over before the war, and now you want as much as he did.”
“It isn’t me,” Geder said.
“I don’t see anyone else in here.”
The shop squatted in a dark street. Scraps of leather lay here and there. A brass tailor’s dummy wrapped in soft black hide that still smelled slightly of the tanner’s yard loomed near the oilcloth window. As armor, leather that thin would be useless. Barely better than cloth, and probably worse than good quilting. As court costume, on the other hand, it would look quite impressive.
“You want it?” the Timzinae asked.
“Sorry, what?”
“The cloak. Commissioned by the Master of Canals, then he vanished in the night just before”—he held up the taxation notice in his black-scaled hand—“our liberation by the noble empire. It’s not done, and I’ve got enough of that dye lot left I could recut it to fit you.”
Geder licked his lips. He couldn’t. Someone would ask where he’d gotten it, and he’d have to explain. Or lie. If he said he’d bought it on the cheap, maybe while he was on the southern roads or from one of the little caravans they’d searched…
“Could you really recut it?”
The Timzinae’s smile was a marvel of cynicism.
“Could you misplace this?” he asked, nodding at the paper.
For a moment, Geder felt the echo of his pleasure riding away from the smugglers, gems and jewels hidden in his shirt. One lost tax notice. At worst it would keep Klin’s coffers a little more sparse, his reports back to Camnipol a little less promising. It would keep the leatherman in his shop for another season; if the man had asked, Geder would probably have “lost” the notice even without the promise of a good cloak.
Besides which, compared to what he’d already done, the twenty silver coins lost to Klin were like a raindrop in the ocean.
“Putting an honest man out of work can’t be to anyone’s benefit,” Geder said. “I’m sure we can work this through.”
“Stand up on that stool, then,” the Timzinae said. “I’ll make sure the drape’s best for your frame.”
Winter was dry season in Vanai. The walls of the canals showed high-water marks feet above the thin ice and sluggish, dark flow. Fallen leaves skittered along the bases of walls, and trees stood bare and dead in the gardens and arbors. The icicles that hung from the wooden eaves of the houses grew thinner by the day, and new snow didn’t come. The nights were bitter, the days merely cold. The city waited for the thaw, the melt, the rush of freshwater and life that came from a spring still months away. Everything was dead or sleeping. Geder walked through the street bouncing on his toes a little, his guardsmen following behind.
When he’d first returned, Geder had locked his doors, taken out the cloth pouch that he’d bought in Gilea, and spread the gems and jewels on his bed. Glittering in the dim light, they’d posed a problem. He had enough available wealth now to make his day-to-day life in Vanai more comfortable, but not as coin. He could sell them, of course, but giving them to gem merchants within the city risked someone recognizing a stone or a piece of metalwork. And if Klin or one of his favorites noticed that Geder had suddenly more coin than he should, nothing good could follow.
He’d answered the problem by sending his squire out to exchange only the most innocuous stones—three round garnets and a diamond in undistinguished silver. The purse of coins had silver and bronze, copper, and two thin rounds of gold frail enough to bend with his fingers. For his lifestyle, it was a fortune, and he carried a portion of it now in his satchel along with a book, ready for his last errand of the day.
The academy looked over a narrow square. In its greater days, it had been a center for the children of the lower nobility and the higher merchant class to hire tutors or commission speeches. The carved oaken archway that led into its great hall was marked with the names of the scholars and priests who had given lectures there over the century and a half since its founding. Within, the air smelled of wax and sandalwood, and sunlight filtered through high horizontal windows, catching motes of dust suspended in the air. Somewhere nearby, a man recited poetry in a deep, resonant voice. He breathed the air of the place.
Footsteps padded up behind him. The clerk was a thin Southling man, his huge dark eyes dominating his face. His body spoke of deference and fear.
“May I help you, my lord? There isn’t a problem?”
“I wanted to find a researcher,” Geder said. “My squire was told this was the place to come.”
The Southling blinked his huge black eyes.
“I… That is, my lord…” The clerk shook himself. “Really?”