“I agree,” Komme said. “Give him a few days to think he’s won. I’ll write him a letter explaining that the holding company has no objection, but the voices of the branches would feel uncomfortable setting business under a crown that uses the spiders. I’ll send a copy to Sir Brendis. It’ll be a carrot to Birancour, since it suggests we would be open to expanding this war gold scheme to them, and a threat to Tracian that we might pull it back.”
The carriage shuddered across a length of bad paving, the wheels rapping the stones like an assault. Komme put his hand on the door until the roughness passed.
“Will he see the danger in that?” Cithrin asked.
“I don’t know. He might not. Not yet. It’s all still a novelty. Once people are used to it—once they’ve lost the memory of coins—we’ll have more leverage. It’s like going down a steep hill in a sled. It’d be easier to steer if it weren’t all going so quickly. But this is how quickly it’s going, so we’d best do what we can.”
The old man sighed and lapsed into silence. Cithrin sat back. The winter cold pressed at her. In Porte Oliva or Vanai, the cities she’d lost, the nights never grew cold the way they did in Northcoast. Carse’s winter was vicious and long and cold. But more than the chill and darkness, she dreaded the winter’s end. As long as the fighting had stopped, there was hope that she could end it. That the chance wouldn’t fall outside her reach. The sound of another cart came from the street and then faded away.
“I was naïve,” she said.
“Everyone is at the start,” Komme said mildly. “Were you thinking of something in particular?”
“The public letters. I thought that by telling people what they were, the world would rise up against them.”
“That if you told them the truth, they would thank you and see things as you do?” Komme said. “Yes, that was naïve. It’s a forgivable error, though.”
“Only if I can correct it,” she said. “Inys didn’t mean to slaughter the world when he upset his brother. He didn’t see the end his actions would take him to either. If the stakes are everything, no errors are forgivable. We have to be better than that.”
“So be wiser than dragons?” Komme said. “Don’t let it be said you aim low.”
“Dragons aren’t wise. They’re only powerful and noble and impressive to the people they fashioned to be easily impressed.”
“True,” Komme said as the carriage shifted and slowed. The gate of the holding company passed the window, and the voices of the grooms and guards and footmen rang out in the dark. Torches flared, and boots tapped against the paving stones. The carriage lurched to a halt, and the door swung open. Two servants stood ready to help them out, but Komme Medean hadn’t moved. His eyes were on Cithrin, glittering in the light as if the fire were in him. His expression was grim and considering. “So how do you win this war? More hunters? More fighters? More public letters exhorting people to take your side?”
No, she wanted to say. It was in her mouth. She could taste the word. Komme lifted his eyebrows, and for a moment, she was a child again, sitting at Magister Imaniel’s table, peppered with his questions. Trying to show that she was clever enough to be loved.
“In part,” she said. “Gathering new allies is part of what we can do, even though they may not all do quite as we’d hoped. That part wasn’t wrong. It was only incomplete.”
The servant at the door cleared his throat and leaned in. “Sir, is there something—”
Komme lifted his hand sharply, and the man went silent. “Go on,” Komme said.
“It’s a war, but it’s also a marketplace. I have to have something better than the people at the next table and at the right price.”
“Lower price?”
“Perhaps. Unless costing more makes it seem more to be valued.”
“And what is it you’re selling? Peace? Been a long line of clever people who couldn’t clear that inventory.”
“Not at first. No. I’m selling dead spiders. As long as their death is worth more to the world than the advantage they give, I won’t need to pull anyone to my side. They’ll find their own reasons.”
“And how do you do that?”
Cithrin was silent for a long time. The torches muttered. The grooms unhitched the horses. Cithrin felt her mind grow still, the knot in her belly loosen. “What do kings want more than power?” she asked.
“Find that, my dear,” Komme said, “and we’ll have something worth knowing. Because in my experience, the answer’s nothing.”
Marcus
Marcus went on campaign the first time when he was sixteen. His first sword had been a thin blade, meant for close, dirty work. Even pretending he’d never carried a knife until that day, he’d spent more of his life armed than not. He’d taken the field in the ice-caked springs of Northcoast and the kiln-hot summers of the Keshet. He’d commanded men and been under the command of generals and doges, princes and kings. He’d wintered in the most libertine of the Free Cities and the most pious garrisons of Herez.
Long experience told him that an army camp had its own logic, its own form, its own character unlike that of any township or hunter’s encampment. Even without setting foot in it, Marcus knew quite a bit about the Anteans’. He couldn’t have said where exactly the tents of the camp followers were, where the dice games were played, who was the company prig and who the joker, who was undercutting which commander when his superiors weren’t about. He knew that they all existed, though. It was only a matter of finding the specifics.
And then, of course, the priests. They had to be found and followed. Once he understood just a bit of their role in the geography of the army, he’d be able to make the plan that the Lord Marshal of Antea and Cithrin bel Sarcour both wanted of him. Along with that, there were other things he was looking at and looking for. Signs and indications, patterns and systems. And again, he knew that they would be there before he knew what they were.
And all the things he saw drew him to the same basic conclusion: Antea, after the most successful and extended campaign he’d heard of outside legend, had destroyed itself.
Part of the blame—though he wouldn’t have said it aloud—lay at Jorey Kalliam’s feet. The boy seemed smart, competent, even well enough read in the theory of leading an army. But he was also little more than a boy, and his mistakes were the mistakes of inexperience. It was possible to hold a small army in the field all through the winter if there was no other option, but this was the bulk of Antea’s fighting force. Even with supply carts coming up from Porte Oliva in the south and water and occasional fish from the little creek that ran through the camp, it was too large to sustain itself. The weariness and hunger of the soldiers made them look like he could push them over with a breath. And the Lord Marshal hadn’t kept discipline in digging the latrines. The frozen ground would make it hell’s own work, true. And shit left out in the cold of the little ravine beside the camp froze. It was easier to let it lie there in piles. After all it didn’t stink. They’d pay for it all when the thaw came, though. First in flies and then in fever.
The placement of the tents said something as well. Cliques were forming among the men. Maybe they’d been there from the start, but the camp wasn’t a unified whole. It was a network of camps centered around Kalliam’s subject lords and sharing a few common resources: the cunning men’s tents, the practice yard, the priests’ tent. Far better to keep the men from fragmenting, especially when they had so many other reasons to be primed for mutiny. If it had been a smaller army—the command of a new leader who was himself answering to some greater lord—it would have been serviceable. Respectable, even. But as the central force of a great empire, it looked like something that the Lord Regent had awarded a young friend instead of an experienced commander.