She stepped out to the street, Marcus and Yardem behind her, and turned to the north. The sky was white from horizon to horizon. Snow melted in the sunlight and glowed bluish in the shadows. Carse wasn’t a beautiful city. It was too open, too austere. She had grown up in the close streets and canals of Vanai, come to her full power in the dense humanity of Porte Oliva. Even the fivefold city of Suddapal—where she’d been as out of place as a candle for the Drowned—had been more beautiful in its way. Carse was unnerving, she realized again, because it was built on the scale of dragons.
Inys could walk through these streets, his tattered wings folded behind him. He could perch in the square or throw himself down to weep among the claw-marks of the Graveyard of Dragons. Children might roll hoops in its squares and alleys, food carts could steam at its corners and fill the air with the scent of roasting nuts and spiced meat, but Carse was not a human city. It was a place for the absent masters of humanity. Or nearly absent.
“We going to see him?” Marcus asked as they walked.
“No,” Cithrin said. “Not the dragon. The troupe.”
Marcus grunted his approval and squinted up into the sun. The lines of his cheekbones cast shadows down his face. The venomous green culling blade was strapped across his back.
“Why do you carry that thing?” she said, speaking her real concern as if it were only banter.
“In case I need to kill someone with it,” he said, just as lightly.
“Expecting a flood of spider priests?”
“No, but I wasn’t expecting the last one either,” Marcus said. “That was nicely done with the war gold just now. Get a few more countries on the same scheme, you’ll have men like Moss willing to take full payment in paper.”
“We’ve had letters from Princip C’Annaldé and Cabral,” she said. “Apparently the idea of giving all the gold there is to the crown is fairly popular among certain strata of power.”
“Imagine that,” Marcus said.
“I only wish we weren’t calling it war gold.”
Yardem cleared his throat. “Any reason not to, ma’am?”
“War’s what we’re fighting against. What we’re trying to avoid. I’m afraid that if we keep the name, we bake it into the new system from the start.”
“New system’s not really new, though, is it?” Marcus said. “There are always people who’d rather not solve problems by killing each other. Or at least by doing it at some remove. It’s why we have people like me and Moss. Karol Dannien. Merrisan Koke.”
“We have mercenary soldiers because we don’t want war?” Cithrin said.
“You have us because you don’t want to go to the field yourself.”
“That’s not why I’m using them.”
“No?”
“No. I want soldiers who won’t hold a grudge against the enemy once it’s done. If you’re fighting out of love or loyalty, peace can be a kind of betrayal. Mercenaries are like whores. By taking money for it, they debase what it means. I want to debase what violence means.”
Marcus laughed, but Yardem didn’t. His great brown eyes met hers. “You may have missed your calling, ma’am. You’d have been a fascinating priest.”
“No!” Marcus said. “No recruiting for the priesthood on my watch, Yardem. I’ve got enough trouble following her when she’s talking about things that exist. Start pulling gods into it, and I’ll lose the thread entirely.”
“Sorry, sir,” Yardem said. “Didn’t mean to confuse you.”
“And you have to call it war gold,” Marcus went on. “If you called it peace gold, no one would take it seriously.”
The news had come three days before from Suddapal, and whether it was good or bad was beyond her capacity to say. The fivefold city, home of the Timzinae race, had risen. The siege at the mountain fortress of Kiaria had broken. The forces of Antea had been put back on their heels. In a normal war, it would have been excellent news. If there was such a thing as a normal war. Cithrin found herself beginning to doubt the idea.
Isadau and Komme had been locked in conference since the courier had arrived, stumbling, exhausted, and filthy, in the middle of the night. Already, the servants were packing Isadau’s things. Taking ship to Elassae now was a terrible risk. Antea held Porte Oliva, and likely the ports of the Free Cities as well. But Barriath’s pirate navy had fast ships, and sailors who knew well how to evade a navy. Cithrin was torn between wanting Isadau to stay and wanting to go with her, though neither was possible. It was a choice between ache and ache.
And as with all aches, she found she could soothe it in a taproom bottle. That the troupe was also there made things convenient for her.
She wanted to like the new actor, but she didn’t. His name was Lak, and he was thin and gawky with eyes the color of ice and an unruly head of hair only just darker than straw. His voice was good, though, and with his paleness against Cary’s dark hair, some striking tableaus became possible. She could see the reasons for choosing him, especially as the company had lost its stage and props and costumes. But he wasn’t Smit. And fair or not, she couldn’t forgive him for that.
Cithrin found them in the yard outside the stables. Cary, her arms crossed and her breath smoking in the cold, stood where the audience would be. Master Kit, Hornet, and Charlit Soon held their places and poses. And Lak. Mikel and Sandr were off somewhere, but a pair of young Timzinae boys stood in the door to the stable, watching with dark and shining eyes.
“Again,” Cary said as Cithrin took another long pull of wine from the glass neck. “From where the king makes his speech.”
Master Kit nodded and walked across to a different spot on the frozen dirt. “Here?”
“That’ll do,” Cary said.
Kit lifted his hand dramatically and turned to Lak. “Boy, know this,” Kit said, his voice suddenly rounder and deeper, as if he were speaking inside a temple. “To be king of all the world would not be enough to sate my hunger. I am more than a throne, more than a land, more than death or love. I am King Ash!”
Lak fell to his knees and Cary sighed impatiently. “No. Stop. It’s still not right.”
“What if I was on his left?” Lak said. Kit put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and shook his head. Cary walked back toward the common room scowling. Lak watched her go with a poorly disguised distress.
“I would be surprised if this was yours to carry,” Kit said to him. “I think it more likely that she’s used to the way we staged it before. Give her time to reimagine how it could be, and I think you’ll see a different side of her.”
“I don’t think she likes me,” Lak said.
Kit didn’t say more, but clapped the boy’s shoulder again and made his way to Cithrin.
“You’re still rehearsing,” she said.
“Did you expect something different?” Kit asked as they fell in step with each other. “We’re actors.”
“It’s only that, with things as they are…”
Kit chuckled, low and warm. “If we only worked when the world was certain, I expect we’d have starved long before this. I’m afraid this one may be beyond us, though, for the time being.”
“The props and the costumes?”
“I think more than that. The Ash and the Pomegranate is, I feel, more a story of war than of love. I’ve always found war stories difficult.”
“Worse than romances?”
“Yes. Love, I believe, is a small thing that feels large. I find the feelings might overwhelm, but the action is between a handful of people. War, by comparison, seems to me so large and happens so differently to so many people that capturing it in a tale leaves me with the sense that I’ve simplified it so much that it no longer resembles the thing it depicts. The best I’ve managed is a story about people while a war goes on around them, but I think that isn’t the same.”