“Can happen,” Yardem said.
“And then there’s me, where it just never seems to get better.”
“It doesn’t, sir.”
“Ever wonder why that is?”
Yardem’s earrings jingled as his ears flicked. “I have some theories, sir.”
“Do you? Well. Keep ’em to yourself.”
“Was my plan.”
The winter wind shifted, pushing snowflakes at him like little handfuls of sand. Marcus squinted into the cold and ignored it. The ice might make him a little blind, but the chances were thin that he and Yardem were going to be ambushed in sight of the dragon they’d escorted to Northcoast. Even if they were, the worst that would happen was they’d all be killed.
He tried to imagine Merian here with him. And Alys. He could hardly recall the shapes of their faces some nights. All that was left was a sense of overwhelming love and overwhelming loss that had names and memories built into it. His daughter’s determined smile when she’d taken her first step. His wife’s arm around his sleeping waist. Years ago. Decades. They were dead. They didn’t miss him. But he’d have cheerfully slaughtered anyone who tried to relieve him of the wounds they’d left behind.
“Made that noise again, sir.”
“I know,” Marcus said. “It ever strike you that we’re doing the same thing as they are?”
“No, sir. It hasn’t.”
“I just mean the mythical spider goddess and all her priests’ hairwash about what history was and what the future’ll be and how it all fits together. They’re just making up stories and getting everyone to act like they’re true. No real stone to build on anywhere.”
“That’s fact, sir.”
“How are Cithrin and her paper gold any different? We’re telling a story and talking people into forgetting that it’s all something we made up. Then we’re using what we’ve snowed them into thinking in order to make the world the shape we want it to be.”
For a long moment, they stood in silence with only the winter wind to reply. Inys, tiring of the game, scooped the dead animal into his gullet and swallowed massively before tucking his head under his great battle-tattered wing. Muffled by the snow, distant footsteps came nearer.
“I still see some distinctions,” Yardem said, but then Halvill burst into the yard. White snow dotted his broad black chitin scales and his inner eyelids flicked open and closed in agitation.
“Captain Wester. Yardem. You’re wanted, both of you, back at the holding company.”
Marcus looked up into Yardem’s wide, considering eyes. “What’s at issue?”
“It’s Barriath Kalliam, sir. He’s come back from Sara-sur-Mar.”
“Ah,” Marcus said. “So the pirate admiral’s finished presiding over the bounty board already, has he? Well, I suppose we should be glad he didn’t get himself killed doing it.”
“No sir,” Halvill said. Then, “I mean, yes sir. I mean, he hasn’t come alone.”
Marcus stood, seeing the excitement in Halvill’s stance clearly for the first time through the veil of his own unease. He felt his spine grow a little straighter, the weight of the sword on his shoulder not so heavy.
“Didn’t come alone?” Marcus said.
“No, sir,” Halvill said. “He’s brought his mother.”
Cithrin Bel Sarcour of the Medean Bank
All the money in the world. Even now, with winter’s progress turning the war sluggish, it was the thought that kept her awake in the night. All the money in the world.
Creating debt was nothing new to her. Conjuring an absence of money was as simple as laying any wager at odds. Should storm or piracy intervene, a weight of silver paid for insurance on a ship might call forth twenty of its kind. To create an obligation for money greater than the actual coins in the coffers was nothing more exotic than a default. It happened, if not constantly, at least often.
But to reverse that, to create letters of transfer that summoned the idea of gold—the function of it—without need of the coin itself, still left her giddy. From the remnants of the fortune from her branch of the Medean bank, she had purchased a debt that would never be repaid, and from that debt she had made all the money in the world. As much as she could print, so long as she kept the confidence of the merchants and tradesmen, nobles and artisans whose custom she had changed.
All the other forms were being kept as they had been. The letters were kept in the same strongboxes that the coin had been. They bore the image of the coins they represented. They traded as coins would trade. King Tracian’s master of coin was even coming around to the idea of accepting them for taxes, which would, she believed, seal them forever as the legitimate equivalent of gold. She had even heard of money changers weighing the papers as if the heft of the pages themselves signified anything. It was a kind of grand theater piece where the whole kingdom—and Narinisle and Herez now as well—ate imaginary food and was miraculously nourished by the exercise.
And because of it, things that had once been impossible were now within reach.
When first she and Isadau had plotted their war in Porte Oliva, desperation had driven them. The breadth and varieties of strategy had been immense. Did the enemy need to cross land to reach you? Offer a guaranteed high price to the farmers along the dragon’s roads for cotton and tobacco, and when the army came to loot the farms, there would be no food to eat. Did the enemy outnumber you? Hire mercenaries wise in the ways of the battlefield and warned against the poisoned voices of the spider priests. Buy ore and drown what couldn’t be used so that Antea and Geder Palliako could forge fewer weapons. Post bounties against the enemy on every front—Elassae, Sarakal, the Free Cities. Even cities of Birancour that hadn’t yet shared Porte Oliva’s fate. Let the enemy face a silent army of the desperate and greedy that you only had to pay.
They had been constrained by the gold in their coffers then. Now that the gates of possibility had opened, Cithrin’s time was spent less generating plans than with putting them in action. Bounty boards were fast and easy. A single local agent in an occupied city could inspire any number of actions against the enemy simply by setting a price on them. Or, if the enemy forces within cities like Nus and Inentai and Suddapal proved too dangerous, some nearby hamlet in Borja or the Keshet could be converted to a base.
Hiring mercenaries was slower than that, but in the long term more effective. The paid blades were for the most part between contracts for the winter. Those who were not subjects of Northcoast or Herez or Narinisle might demand coin rather than the letters of transfer, but Cithrin was confident that she could buy hard coin with credit if she found the right discount rate. It wasn’t as though the gold of Northcoast was needed in the kingdom any longer. Not if she had her way about it. Fixing prices on ore and inedible crops, while ultimately more powerful, took a greater time to see results. She found herself wishing that victory against the enemy might be a matter of years, just so she could see all her schemes enacted.
She sat in her workroom in the holding company’s compound, the dim, fitful light of winter that came through the window adding blue to the buttery yellow light of her candles. Her ledgers piled the desk, and maps lay unrolled and tacked to the walls. A bottle of wine still half-full stood forgotten beside a plate of cheese and hard sausage. In her small space, the world opened like a blossom in springtime, visible only to her. And to people who had the trick of seeing the world as she saw it.