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“Prince Geder,” the priest said, and then to Mecelli, “Lord.”

“We’re dead,” Mecelli said, and the gutter diction was like a slap. “The Lord Regent wanted you to hear it, and by God, I do too. We’re dead. Elassae’s all but taken back from us, Inentai’s fallen. Sarakal will not hold.”

Basrahip’s expression sobered, and he lowered he head. “I hear the despair in your voice, my friend,” he said. “But know this: the power of the goddess has already won. No force in the world can stand against her will. She is truth itself, and the allies of deceit will—”

“Stop it!” Mecelli shouted, standing so quickly that his chair tipped back and clattered against the floor. Geder’s heart skipped. Rage darkened Mecelli’s face to purple and the man’s clenched fists promised more than rhetorical violence. “You listen to me, priest. You hear my voice. There is not a single Antean soldier left alive in Inentai and there are thousands of sword-and-bows that answer to Borja or the traditional families of Sarakal or a paymaster bent on taking bounties from our dead. Your priests there are burned. Your temple there, they knocked to the ground and pissed on the gravel. It’s gone!”

Geder’s breath was coming too quickly, shuddering. Something was wrong. He was having an attack of something. He stumbled back, wondering whether he would have time to reach a cunning man. If Mecelli saw his distress, he ignored it.

“We have no way to retake the city. None. What little we had left is busy dying in Elassae. If the Timzinae and the traditional families have made common cause—and they have—Nus will fall with the first thaw. There will be enemy armies marching on Kavinpol by midsummer!”

A moment came, shorter than a breath.

It struck Geder in the heart like a hammer.

After the moment passed, Basrahip smiled and bellowed, he invoked the goddess and her will and her power as he always had. Geder watched as Mecelli’s despair and rage were battered by the flood of words and imprecations. He watched Mecelli shift from the certainty of their doom to a listless, halfhearted kind of hope. The optimism of a fever. By the time Canl Daskellin arrived, it was all but over. Mecelli made his report to Daskellin: there had been a setback in the East. Inentai would have to be reconquered when the spring broke. The temple there would have to be rededicated. Daskellin listened soberly. It was all as it had been before. As it would be again, if they needed their faith in the powers of the goddess renewed.

All of it the same as ever, except for when the priest had heard Mecelli say the enemy army would arrive by midsummer, and for a moment shorter than a breath and longer than a lifetime, Geder had looked into Basrahip’s face like he was looking down a well and seen confusion there.

Cithrin

No,” the dragon said. “I’m not your cart horse. I took the Stormcrow on his errand. I don’t care to take you on yours. If it’s so important that you be there, go. I will find you if I need you.”

Inys turned his great head away from her and laid it on the ground. His great claws flexed, gouging the flesh of the land apparently without his being aware of doing it. The chill wind bit at Cithrin’s cheeks and earlobes as she stood, deciding whether to press on. She knew that he was sulking, and she thought she guessed why. With Marcus gone and her going, both of the humans Inys knew best were leaving the last dragon behind. And God forbid that he not be the center of all things.

The temptation to chide him for his behavior was difficult to withstand. Phrases like You’ll have other people to tell you how important you are and This is beneath the last dragon and Are you a child? all rose in her mind, and she turned them all away. They might shame Inys into doing what she wanted of him or they might spur him to casual slaughter. And of all humanity, the only one he seemed to care about preserving was Marcus. She wasn’t certain that her value in the dragon’s eyes was high enough to protect her, so she stood for a long moment, looking out over the slate-grey sea under a slate-grey sky, then turned and walked away.

The taproom was warm and loud and busy, and she walked past it without a thought. Since her night with Barriath, she’d stopped drinking. It was always hard, every time she did it, but she needed her wits now. Around her, Carse fell away, step by step. The wide roads were as cold as they had been when the winter was new. The towers as grey.

If there was any change at all, it was only in the slowly contracting span of the nights, the inexorable effort of the light to hold the darkness at bay a few minutes more than the day before, and a scent in the air that hinted at the green and new. In a different year, they’d have been the beacons of hope. Winter’s back broken at last. But this would be a war spring. If she failed, it would be the first of a very long line of them. Or no. Not even the first.

At the holding company, the servants ignored her and the guards nodded her past their swords and axes. The first hard taps of rain sounded against the stones as she ducked into the warmth of the house. Not snow. Not even hail. Rain. Even the clouds were warmer than they’d been.

She found Komme Medean waiting for her in her room. A small fire danced and spat in the grate. The old man’s gout had taken pity on him, and his joints were of a merely human proportion for the time. He looked up at her with eyes unshadowed by the cunning man’s draughts and tinctures, and she made a little bow, only half in jest. She felt the coppery taste of fear, but pressed it down.

“Will he take you away, then?”

She considered pretending ignorance, but discarded the thought. Better to play it bare. “No hope,” she said. “Not from him.”

“Probably better,” Komme said. “You’d make up something in speed, it’s true. But a fast boat with a good crew’s nothing to look down on either.”

Cithrin lowered herself to the floor beside the grate, the heat of the flames pressing against her arm. Komme Medean looked down at her along the length of his nose. In the flickering light, she could almost forget who he was: the master of a bank that had spanned nations. And still did. And would again, if the idea of nations and countries and kingdoms survived the coming chaos. All her life had been lived in awe of Komme Medean, in the shadow of him and the institution he’d piloted to greatness. He was only a man. Clever, talented, and lucky, but as subject to illness and time, fear and foolishness, as anyone. He smiled at her.

“I met your parents once,” he said. “When they placed their money with the bank, Magister Imaniel had them meet with me. I was traveling in the Free Cities at the time, so it wasn’t as grand a gesture as it sounds. We all had dinner together at a table beside a canal. It was roast pork. And almonds. I didn’t remember that until just now, but it was.”

Cithrin was quiet. She knew little of her family apart from the fact of her parents’ death and the extended family’s disavowal of the half-breed daughter. She thought she should feel something more when she heard of her parents, but it was like hearing names from a song. I ate with Drakkis Stormcrow once, and danced with the Princess of Swords. Father and Mother were ideas, not people. Roles that someone might play, like Magister or Clerk. Or Enemy. Statement of function and relationship, not identity. Komme sighed.