“You might get your wish and die before me,” Cithrin said. “If you fall, I’m picking up your damned blade myself.”
The last morning—she couldn’t think of it as anything else—dawned without a moment of sleep behind it. The day came early in the high summer, and rich with birdsong and the clatter of carts in the streets. Cithrin washed, changed into the robes that would let her pass as a servant, and tried to prepare her heart for what was to come. She could as easily have willed herself to fly.
The sunlight slanted in from the east when they set out through the cobbled streets. Lehrer Palliako led them, riding a tall black horse and bright clothes like a man heading for a festival. Or, less charitably, performing at one. He was there to be seen and to draw any casual attention to himself and away from the motley train of servants behind him.
For the first few streets, Cithrin felt her heart in her throat. But with every corner they passed, every tradesman who pulled aside to make way for the Lord Regent’s father, every street cleaner waiting with barrow and shovel for them to pass, every beggar and child and half-wild dog that saw them without any light coming into their eyes, she felt a strange elation growing in her.
No one knew, and so no one saw. They were disguised as much by their improbability as by their robes. The grey-haired Kurtadam woman selling wilted cabbages in the square lived in a world where the question was how the goddess and the Lord Regent were going to defeat the roach army. If she even thought of that. More likely, she wasn’t even concerned with that so much as whether she’d be able to get rid of her produce before it started to rot. The baker’s boy with his handcart piled with sacks of flour didn’t see a suspicious bunch of servants trailing after an anxious-looking nobleman so much as an obstacle in his morning errands that he had to track around. Cithrin walked among them unrecognized either for herself or the change she was about to bring upon them all. Or try to, at any rate.
Geder waited at an ivied archway, the entrance to one of the royal gardens. He wore a light summer tunic with braiding of gold down the sides, and the crown of his regency on his head. His personal guard stood along the edge of the garden, facing out, and created the sense of a wall even in the stretches where no actual wall existed. When the guard stood aside to let the grooms help the Lord Regent’s father off his mount, Cithrin had to bite her lips to keep from laughing. She was fairly certain that once she’d started, it would have been hard to stop, and it wouldn’t be the sort of laughter that promised sanity.
After the press and noise and stink of the streets, the royal quarter seemed too quiet and sparsely peopled to be part of the same city. No gardeners tended the deep-green hedges and breeze-shuddered flowers, no slaves sang at the little hidden corners to sweeten the summer air for the court. It was expected, of course. She’d told Geder to send as many people as he could away. To see it all in motion was eerie all the same.
Once they were out of sight of the guard, Geder stopped pretending to walk with his father and came to her side. His eyes were bright and he bounced on the balls of his feet with every step, like a boy excited for cake.
“The pieces are in place?” Marcus asked even before Geder could speak.
“The blacksmith delivered them this morning,” Geder said.
“The priests?” Cithrin said. Something passed through Geder’s expression that she couldn’t read, a flicker here then gone that reminded her of the day she’d seen him cut down Dawson Kalliam. She was almost pleased to see it.
“Gathering. It isn’t like it was before, but I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or I have. It seems like there’s more fighting now. They rub each other the wrong ways all the time. Basrahip’s been going to all of them and promising how they’ll all be reconciled and I have seen her plan.”
“Both true,” Cithrin said, “if not the way he means it.”
“He keeps asking to see me before the gathering at the temple, but I’ve put him off. Better not to have the chance for things to go wrong.”
Cithrin made a little sound of agreement.
When they reached the entrance of the Kingspire, the wide doors stood open and the great halls beyond empty. From so near, the banner of the goddess was only a shifting darkness that clung to the walls high above her. A shadow the light couldn’t dispel. The sun had risen higher than she’d expected, the morning more than half-gone already.
Master Kit and Cary huddled for a moment with the rest of the players, bowed their heads together the way they sometimes did before a performance. Marcus stood at Geder’s side, ignoring the Lord Regent’s almost palpable annoyance. Rough cloth wrapped the poisoned sword on his back, too valuable to discard and too dangerous to expose, especially here where so many of the priests might know it for what it was.
A sparrow flew past, its fluttering brown wings loud in the air.
“Torch ready?” Marcus asked.
“On the dueling ground,” Geder said, nodding to the west and the great chasm of the Division. “All that needs is lighting. How… how long will it take before the dragon comes?”
“Damned if I know,” Marcus said. “Great bastard may not show up at all.”
He clapped Geder’s shoulder and walked away. Geder glanced from Cithrin to Yardem to the captain’s sword-crossed and retreating back. “He’s joking, isn’t he? The dragon’s coming. It’s going to be here.”
“There’s always some element of improvisation in the plan,” Yardem said mildly, and flicked his ear. “Looks a long way up. We should go. You staying here, Magistra?”
Cithrin clasped her hands behind her back so tightly that her knuckles ached. Everything in her body was stretched so tightly that she felt the way a viol string sounded. Clara and Aster would be waiting by the path to the gaol, ready to go with her as soon as Geder returned. There was so much to do and so much doubt. She closed her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be waiting when you come back.”
Geder surged forward and took her hand in his. His eyes were intense and dark, his mouth in a scowl that was meant to be heroic. “We will return,” he said, then turned to Yardem and spoke with a false lightness. “We’d best get started. As you said, it can be a long way up.”
Yardem nodded to her and smiled his placid canine smile that might have meant anything: He’s green or Don’t worry, it will all work out or It’s been good knowing you. Cithrin felt the urge to take the Tralgu man in her arms, but she was afraid that Geder might take it as a precedent. “Thank you, Yardem,” she said.
She watched them walk into the vast mouth of the tower. A moment later, the high priest joined them. She watched as the huge man traded words with Geder that she could not hear, and then walked away. She stood for a moment, her heart a complication of elation and fear and a vast anticipated grief.
When she walked away into the gardens, the actors were setting the weapons at the ready on the rough gravel paths. The bright steel looked wrong in Sandr’s hands, and she realized she’d become so accustomed to seeing mock weapons in their hands that the bright steel of the real thing seemed wrong. Cary’s laughter seemed to echo the birdsong. Sandr and Hornet and Mikel snapped and argued like they were trying to put together a stage.
Marcus strode to the knot of men, Lak at his side, and pulled Sandr and Mikel away from the weapon. He shook his head in an amused sort of disgust and strode off toward the dueling yard. It was all so familiar and also so estranged from all she knew. A dream she couldn’t wake from. The minutes stretched, time bending itself like a fiddler’s arm to make her nerves ring.