Charlit Soon yelped and sped past them down the street. Sandr and Mikel were struggling around the corner of a brewer’s yard, pulling a low wooden cart loaded with sacks behind them. Old cloth and thread, Cithrin guessed. Perhaps some lumber. The raw material for costumes and a better stage, false swords and paste-and-leaf crowns. The slow rebuilding of all that they’d lost to the great war.
“I can’t remember not being afraid,” Cithrin said. “I can’t remember what it was like when Antea wasn’t killing people.”
“Palliako’s war has been greater and worse than any war I’ve seen or heard of,” Kit said. The paving stones gave way to a wide strip of dragon’s jade. A path through the city unworn by the ages.
“It started before that, though,” Cithrin said. “I started being afraid in Vanai, and there weren’t any priests then. Or only the normal sort. Prayers and herbs and promises about justice after you die. Not like them. Not like—” She pressed her lips together, but Kit knew what she hadn’t said.
“Not like me,” he said.
“We talk about Morade’s spiders as if they were the root of all the evil, all the killing, but they aren’t, are they? Because they’ve been back in their temple long enough that no one even remembered they were real, and there have been wars and murders and cities burned all that time.”
“I understand there have been, yes,” Kit said. “It seems to me that the source of war isn’t the dragons or magic or the spiders in the blood. I hear the histories and learn the songs, and I feel that humanity is the beginning of it all. Pain and lust and vengeance and oppression. But I also see that we are capable of tremendous compassion and hope. I think of all the cities that war has razed, and still, we’ve built more than we’ve torn down. I think of all the things of beauty that found their end in violence, but there keep being more beautiful things.” Kit gestured at the city around them. “As I see it, Morade’s spiders didn’t create a fault in us, but rather inflamed what was already there.”
“Certainty’s always brittle, and disagreement’s inevitable,” Cithrin said. “And so apostates.”
“And schisms,” Kit agreed. “The creation of enemies from those who were once allies. And I may be wrong, but it’s seemed to me that the sense of betrayal by someone who you thought of as one of your own is even more punished than simply being of a dissenting tribe. If you think of it, I am an example of what the spiders were meant to do. I believed as they did, worshipped as they did, and then I had a thought that took me from the group.”
“Only instead of running off and starting your own church to lead into battle against them, you turned into an actor,” Cithrin said.
“And yet, it seems I still find myself at the head of a kind of army fighting against the men I once called brothers. I lost faith in the goddess, and in the story we told of her. The world that brought her forth. The apostate who came to King Tracian broke with the Basrahip in Camnipol over issues of doctrine. I broke with the temple because I came to understand the words truth and certainty differently. I’m not sure the distance between my heresy and theirs is as great as I would like to pretend.” A small dog trotted past, a length of rope in its jaws. The sounds of cartwheels clattering against stone and a woman laughing seemed to blend into each other, and the low, white sky. Kit put a hand on her shoulder. “Is something troubling you?”
“I don’t think I can win,” Cithrin said. “I’m doing as much as I can. I’ve sent the letters about the spiders and what they are all down the coast, east to Asterilhold and Borja and All-star. I’ve doubled the bounties against Antean forces and shifted what we’re paying for so that it’s bent to take on the spiders. I’ve hired all the mercenaries I could find to keep the Lord Marshal’s army from coming north and to keep the peace if he retreats the way Clara seems to expect him to. But I keep thinking that I’m fighting Antea, and then remembering that I’m really fighting the spiders. And then remembering that I’m not fighting the spiders, but the impulse toward war.”
At the common room, someone was shouting, and then two people, and then a dozen. It didn’t sound like violence so much as a shared celebration, but it might have been a brawl. It was hard to know.
“And how many swords does it take to defeat an idea?” Kit said.
Geder
There were an endless parade of events and feasts, rituals, and customary celebrations in the course of a season at court. When Geder was a boy, his father had taken him to many. As Lord Regent, Geder suffered through them all. Of them, many—the grand audience, the Remembrance Ball, Midsummer—occurred at set times, predictable as the fall of sand in a glass. With a few, though, there was no set schedule. First Thaw with its honey floss and candy ice came when the warm winds blew it to them. Abandon Night with its masks and smokes and dangerous sexuality came when an heir to the throne was born. And a triumph came at the end of a military campaign when the soldiers returned to camp outside the walls of Camnipol, and their commander called the disband. For those sorts of occasions, part of their joy was their uncertainty.
Geder had been a child when the rebellion in Anninfort was put down. He tied his memory of his first triumph to that, but he could have been misremembering. As he recalled it, the streets had been filled with cheering men and women of all classes—from barons and lords to beggars and pisspot boys. He remembered it as being overwhelming.
He’d seen others since. Had one of his own after his return from Vanai. The overall shapes had been the same. The conquering hero—or defender of the empire, if the campaign hadn’t gained any new land for Antea—moved through the city to the accolades of Camnipol. The walls were decorated, sometimes in the house colors, sometimes in the king’s, sometimes just with whatever looked most festive and came to hand. Then there were feasts and parties in the houses of the most honored lords, with the commander whose men had just earned their release the most honored guest.
It seemed wrong that this particular triumph should seem so weak and vaguely foul. It was, after all, the one that marked the final battle in humanity’s war against the dragons. The apostate’s death was the dawn of the new, brighter age. The spider goddess’s power was sweeping invisibly out from the spot where her false servant had died. Basrahip had explained it all to him. Of course, it being winter, there were few lords at court. And there was more pleasure in parading down streets that didn’t have ice coating the cobblestones. There was music, but it was thinner. There were houses with open doors and plates of bread and meat and cakes, but they all opened just ahead of the procession and closed again behind it. Not that he blamed them. It was a cold, grey, miserable day. An icy wind pushed the fog from the southern plains north until it broke against the walls of the city and filled the Division with mist the color of milk. The Kingspire darkened to the color of iron against the low, grey sky. Cunning men on the street corners performed small miracles of light and fire, but no one crowded around to throw coins at their feet.
His soldiers, returned to their lives with the success of his campaign, trailed behind him. Very old and very young, thin and fat and coughing. They looked more like slaves of a fallen foe than heroes returned in glory. Geder held his chin high, but the cold made his nose run, and really he just wanted the parade over so he could go inside.
It was the greatest triumph in history, and all he felt was tired and dispirited and ashamed of himself for feeling tired and dispirited. Was he really so shallow that he couldn’t be pleased with just the truth? Did it all have to come with cloth-of-gold and flares and music to mean something?