“I do,” the high priest said. “You didn’t come here to write an essay, Lord Geder. You came here to find us. To find me.”
Geder felt his mouth in a grim, hard scowl.
“I did,” he said. “Because I want to know the truth. Because I am sick to death of wondering. All the lies and deceits and games that everyone plays around me? I want to be the one man who can cut it away and find the truth. And so I heard about the end of all doubt.”
“Would knowing alone be enough? Would it bring you peace?”
“It would,” Geder said.
Basrahip paused, listening. A fly whined around them, landed on the big man’s wide head to drink his sweat, and flew away again.
“It wouldn’t,” Basrahip said, hauling himself back to his feet. “That isn’t what you want. But you are coming closer, Lord Geder. Much closer.”
I heard them talking,” one of his servants whispered. “They’re going to kill us all in our sleep.”
Geder sat in the darkness of his cell. The whispers were supposed to be quiet enough to escape him. If he’d been back in his cot, they would have. Instead, he’d slipped out and padded across the dark floor on silent feet. His back was to the wall beside the doorway, his servants not seven feet away.
“Stop talking shit,” his squire said. “You’re just scaring yourself.”
“I’m not,” the first voice said again, higher and tighter this time. “You think they want people knowing where they are? You think they’re at the ass end of the world because they want company?”
A third voice said something, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“And let them,” the first voice said. “What I heard, he burned down Vanai just because he could, and laughed while he did it.”
“Keep talking about his lordship that way and it won’t be these sand monkeys in priest robes that kill you,” his squire’s voice said. “I’ll face down a hundred false gods before I cross him.”
Geder hugged his knees closer. He expected to feel hurt, but the pain didn’t come. Or anger. He rose to his feet, walking without any attempt to be quiet. He heard the silence of the servants outside his door, but he didn’t care about them. Not what they thought, not what they were, not if they lived. He found his tunic and a pair of leggings and pulled them on in the darkness. He didn’t bother trying to get the stays all tied. Modesty was preserved, and that was enough. Basrahip wouldn’t mind.
When he walked out into the starlit dark, his servants were pretending to sleep. He stepped over them, walking the narrow path along the mountainside, the dirt cooling his feet and the stones biting them. In the first cell he reached where a monk slept, he shook the man awake.
“Take me to Basrahip,” he said.
The high priest slept deeper in the temple. His rooms were dark, the pallet he slept on hardly big enough to accommodate him. The monk who’d brought Geder set down his candle and backed out of the room bowing. Basrahip tucked one massive leg under himself and sat up. He seemed perfectly alert. Geder cleared his throat.
“I’ve been thinking. About what you asked. I want to master the court. I want the men who used me to suffer,” he said. “I want them to beg my forgiveness. I want them humiliated where the world can point at them and pity them and laugh.”
The high priest didn’t move, and then, slowly, he grinned. He lifted a massive finger and pointed it at Geder.
“Yes. Yes, that is what you want. And tell me this, my friend. My brother. Would that be enough?”
“It’ll do for a start.”
The high priest threw his head back and howled with laughter. As he grinned, his teeth shone white as ivory in the candlelight. He stood, wrapping his blanket around him, and Geder found himself grinning too. Saying the words, having them understood, was like taking a stone off his chest.
“I had hoped, Lord Geder,” the high priest said. “From the moment I saw you—an honored man from a great kingdom—I hoped that this was the time. That you would be the sign the goddess sent, and you are. Brother Geder, you are. You have found your truth, and if you will honor it, so shall I.”
“Honor it?”
“Camnipol. Your great city at the heart of your empire. Pledge her a temple there, a first temple in a new age free from lies and doubt. I will return with you myself, and through me…”
The huge man held out his hands, palms up. With the candle on the floor, it was as if he were offering handfuls of shadow. Geder couldn’t stop grinning. He felt light and uncomplicated and alive in a way he hadn’t since he’d scooped gems from frozen boxes half a year before.
“Through me,” the high priest said, “she will give you what you want.”
Clara Annalie Kalliam Baroness of Osterling Fells
My lady,” the Tralgu door slave said, bowing.
“Good morning, Andrash,” Clara said, stretching the kinks out of her back. “I can’t begin to tell you how good it is to be back in the city. I do love the holding in its own right, but it simply wasn’t built for the summer sun. Vincen will be… You remember Vincen? He’ll be seeing to the things we brought, if you could find someone to help him?”
“Yes, my lady. Your sons are, I believe, in the summer garden.”
“Sons?”
“Captain Barriath arrived some days ago,” the slave said.
“Jorey and Barriath in the same house. Well, that can’t have been pleasant.”
The door slave smiled.
“It is good to have you back, my lady.”
Clara patted the old man’s arm as she left the heat and warmth of their private square for the dim and cool of the mansion proper. She saw at once how things had slipped. The flowers in the hall vases were wilted. The floor had a layer of grit blown in by the wind and not yet washed away. The air was close and stuffy the way it got when the windows had stayed shut for too many days in a row. Jorey had been much too amiable with the house staff. Or else he was growing to be as oblivious as his dear father. Either way, something would have to be done.
She heard the boys’ voices before she reached the garden. Jorey’s voice was higher, shriller, more demanding. Barriath tended to spit his arguments as if they tasted bad. From the time Jorey had had words, the two had been like fire and rain to each other, but they were devoted to one another. Clara had had much the same relationship with her own sister. No one can harm her but me, and I shall destroy her. Love was so often like that.
At the steps down into the summer garden, she paused.
“Because it’s simplistic, that’s why,” Jorey said. “There’s a hundred things happening, and they all tie into each other. Now that there isn’t going to be a farmer’s council, are we facing another grain revolt? If Northcoast’s really on the edge of another round of succession wars, will Asterilhold be distracted from us? Are the new Hallskari ship designs going to mean more piracy in Estinport and less in Tauendak? You can’t take everything like that and press it down into one thing. The world’s more complex than that.”
“There are fewer choices than you believe, brother,” Barriath said. “You won’t find someone against the farmers and supporting Asterilhold. If you want one, you take the other. No family will forbid mixing races and also trade with Borja. The king isn’t like a sculptor with a fresh stone, able to make whatever he sees fit. He’s like a man walking into a sculptor’s yard picking from what’s already there.”
“And you think the prince is the only way he can show his favor?”
“The only one that matters,” Barriath said. “If his majesty gave every favor and grant he has to Daskellin, and sent Aster to be the ward of Maas, he’d still be saying that in the long term, the kingdom will be shaped by Maas’s vision. That’s why Issandrian—”
“But if the king—”
The two voices intertwined, neither boy listening to other, and the threads of their arguments tangled into a single ugly knot. Clara stepped out into the garden and put her hands on her hips in feigned accusation.