“Love,” Cithrin said. “He craves love.”
“He can have it at the end of a sword,” Barriath said, hotly. Shut up, Cithrin thought. You’re so much better when you’re not interrupting me.
Aloud, though: “You knew him from court. From before he was Lord Regent. Your brother served with him at Vanai. There must be people Geder loves?”
“You mean besides you?” Barriath said, laughter in his voice.
He reached out and touched her arm. He was a strong man. A Firstblood, with years of hard labor on the sea to thicken his shoulders and roughen his hands. He could have lifted her and tossed her out the window without opening the shutters first. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but whatever it was, he flinched back.
“Tell me who Geder Palliako loves,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Barriath said, his voice diminished. “His only near family is a father.”
“And how can I take control of him?”
Entr’acte: Porte Oliva
Vicarian Kalliam, priest of the goddess, sat on the seawall and looked out to the south. The winter sea below him was a deceptive blue that promised the warmth of midsummer. Kurrik sat at his side, legs folded under him, and looked out over the water as well. The paper cone of sugared almonds, they passed between them. At their backs, the salt quarter of Porte Oliva bustled and chattered to itself. A grey cat with notched ears slunk along the wall, caught sight of them, and dashed away. Vicarian watched it vanish among the shadows.
“It is beautiful, this sea,” Kurrik said. His almost-but-not-quite-Kesheti accent clipped the words in strange places, like a familiar animal butchered into unfamiliar cuts. Vicarian understood the sense of them always, but found something new there as well.
“It’s a gentler sea here than in the north,” he said. “Clearer water too. If you go south from here along the coast of Lyoneia, there are islands in water so clear you can see down to the seabed. The Drowned call them Dead Islands. Nothing lives in the water there but seaweed. Not even oysters and clams.”
“Why is this, do you think?”
“No idea,” Vicarian said, pinching another almond between his fingers, then popping it into his mouth. “But it does seem the colder the water gets, the better it resembles soup.”
“At the temple, we heard of the sea. I imagined it as a wide lake. This is better.”
“It is,” Vicarian said.
In his years studying to become a priest—the traditional role for the second son of a landed noble—Vicarian had participated in the mysteries of half a dozen of the more popular cults. He’d drunk wine and recited stanzas of the Puric Creed under the half-moon. He’d prayed to the empty chair that was the symbolic center of the Lissien Rite. For four long months, he’d fasted or eaten only flour paste and water until he’d found visions at the bottom of the secret Shoren Temple hidden deep in the caverns and ruins under Camnipol, though in fact the visions he’d suffered seemed as plausibly the results of starvation and sleeplessness as anything holy. For the greater part, the Antean court treated its religions much the way it did hunts or feasts or ceremonial balls. The stories of gods and goddesses, of the spirits of the wood and the water, were taken seriously by a few. Membership in the rites was more important by far than actual belief.
Vicarian had quite enjoyed it. It had felt at the time like a kind of pretend that none of them—or at least none of the smarter of them—took all that seriously. There were a few here and there for whom the creeds and rites meant something deeper, but so far as Vicarian could see, none of those ever displayed a power from the divine more impressive than a street-corner cunning man’s. The philosophical disputations carried some actual pleasure, though.
He had spent countless hours sitting with his fellow novices, crawling through the knottier problems of living in a god-haunted world. Could the gods be mistaken? Were the figures in the various dogmas truly separate, or did they represent aspects of a single, unitary, wider faith? Was divine will discovered by prayer or created by it?
The long nights of disputation held an honored place in his memory, like running down the halls of his father’s house with his brothers or climbing a very large tree at the corner of their garden that he wasn’t supposed to climb. Innocent pleasures he’d indulged in joyfully, once when he was young.
The cult of the spider goddess was a very different thing. The clarity he knew now, the unveiling of the world and the souls of the people he spoke with, was subtler and more beautiful than the talents of the most talented cunning man. The coming age of purity promised a peace unlike anything the world had seen. He’d played for years at being holy without understanding what being holy was. Now he had achieved it.
Kurrik had been there from the start, tending to him and the other inductees in the temple at the top of the Kingspire. Whispering words of comfort and promise in those first difficult hours and days when the goddess’s power was still new to him, when his blood had not yet finished changing from his own to hers. That he was in Porte Oliva now, tending to Jorey’s conquest, felt like the goddess expressing her favor like an indulgent nurse letting him sneak a honeystone before bed.
“This is the Inner Sea, yes?” Kurrik asked.
“It depends on how you judge it, actually,” Vicarian said. “Some captains say that the Inner Sea stops at Maccia and this is the Ocean Sea. Others call it the Inner Sea until you’ve lost all sight of shore and headed out on the blue water for Far Syramys.”
Kurrik grunted, scooping up the last two almonds in his fingers and shaking his head. “Something is or it is not. So many names for the same water? It is a symptom of the world of lies.”
“I understand it has something to do with port taxes,” Vicarian said, chuckling. “So, yes, I suppose it is.”
Kurrik smiled, balled the remaining paper into a wad the size of his thumb, and tossed it out over the wall. A seagull swooped in, plucked the pale dot out of the air, and sloped away again. Vicarian stood and held out his hand, helping draw his fellow priest up. The midday sun held a bit of warmth, and there was no snow, even in the alleys and corners. So deep in the winter, Camnipol would be encased in ice. Jorey and the army, still in the field, would be shivering in their boots. Feeling cold in Porte Oliva was a sign of decadence. And still, Vicarian did feel a little cold.
“Walk with me? Take off the chill?” he said.
“Always, brother,” Kurrik said.
Vicarian had never been to Birancour before he came as its conqueror. He had no knowledge of Porte Oliva to use in making a comparison, but it seemed to him that for a fallen city, it was doing fairly well. Certainly the scars were there. Empty, soot-dark doorways where fires had gutted buildings during the sack. Gouges on the walls where arrows and bolts had chipped away the pale stucco. Street-corner carts where a girl might sell cups of sweet mash or strips of peppered meat that were empty now, the girls who’d stood them dead or fled. He’d heard for many years of the puppets of Porte Oliva, the public debates and competing performers. There were a few such now, but only a few.
As they strolled through the streets, their guard at a polite remove, Vicarian pulled his hands into his sleeves against the cold. The citizens—milk-pale Cinnae, otter-pelted Kurtadam, thick-featured Firstbloods—made way for them, and Vicarian couldn’t say if it was out of respect or fear or whether the two had a great deal of difference between them now. There were, of course, no Timzinae.
After the sack, the roaches and enemies of the goddess had been rounded up. Some had been consigned to the yard of stocks and gallows that divided the palace from the newly reconsecrated temple of the goddess. Others had been weighted down and thrown into the bay. Some had burned. Vicarian supposed that to the uninitiated and unaware, it would have looked like monstrosity. It worried him, but only a little. With time, his voice and Kurrik’s would bring the truth to them. Antea’s invasion was the best thing that could have happened to them. They hadn’t been beaten, but saved.