“But,” Komme Medean said through a vicious scowl, “with these fucking priests spreading lies no one can see through—themselves included—every little whorl becomes a whirlpool.”
“Has that potential, sir,” Yardem said. “Yes.”
Barriath cleared his throat and leaned forward. “If we could maintain the army as a whole and draw them back to Camnipol before they broke? And especially if we could coordinate an occupation by Birancouri soldiers who knew to watch for the priests?”
The Timzinae woman—Isadau—had been silent. Now she lifted her chin. When she spoke, her voice was thin and resonant as a bowed string. “Have we decided this, then? Is there no conversation about the people who’ve been killed or the families shattered?”
Cithrin bel Sarcour nodded, not in agreement, but a kind of recognition, as if the phrase was part of some other conversation.
“Isadau,” Komme Medean began, but the woman went on, her voice more terrible for being as matter-of-fact.
“I don’t ask for myself… No, that isn’t true. I saw my city humiliated,” she said. “I saw Firstblood men whipping Timzinae women through the street for sport. Children stolen from their mothers and fathers. Sometimes the priests were there, and sometimes they were not. I respect that the Lord Marshal and his mother aren’t pleased with Geder Palliako, but how does that wash clean all that’s been done in Antea’s name? Do we believe we can end this without also demanding justice? Because I am not convinced.”
And in a breath, what had been a meeting of minds with a common purpose became split. The Timzinae woman stood in one world, and Clara—to her dismay—in another. Like flakes of iron pulled by a lodestone, the others would become allies of one or the other. Already she could see it. Barriath shifting in his seat, moving toward her as if to protect her from attack. Cithrin easing down her gaze, pricked by a moment of shame perhaps. Guilt at her disloyalty. Chana Medean and Paerin Clark glancing at the old man of the banking house to see how Komme reacted to the question, but the old man’s face was blank as stone.
And it had all been going so well up to now.
Clara took a deep breath, searching for words that would bring them back together. She couldn’t imagine what they were. To her surprise it was Captain Wester who spoke.
“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog. If the question’s how much do we have to punish the other side before we can stomach peace, my experience is you can do the enemy a damned lot of hurt before it starts feeling like justice enough. Most times it comes down to how many of them you can kill before you get tired and bored. And whether you can break them so they don’t take their turn after. Looking for everyone to feel happy is waiting for yesterday.”
The Timzinae woman’s inner eyelids closed with a faint click and she rocked back an inch as if she’d been slapped. The Tralgu’s tall, mobile ears went flat against his head in what looked like chagrin. “He’ll be better in a few days, ma’am.”
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” Isadau said and walked stiffly from the room.
Wester sighed. “Am I going to have to apologize for that?”
“Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said.
“Put it on the board for tomorrow.”
“Was already planning to, sir.”
“Still, she brings up a fair point,” Komme said. “Even if you pull Antea back inside its borders, there are going to be a lot of people howling for blood. It might not be too early to start thinking about what reconciliation would look like.”
Barriath snorted, “The spiders have been in play since before the dragons fell. Don’t you think we should find how to win against the priests first?”
“Or figure out who we’re talking about when we say we,” Wester said.
Cithrin bel Sarcour raised her thin, pale hand. Her gaze was fixed on nothing, as if she were reading a text invisible to everyone else. “It has to all happen at once. The spider priests, the war—all the wars. And building what comes after to keep it from all starting up again. It all has to happen at the same time.”
“That’s quite a bit to ask,” Komme said.
“Well,” Clara said, “necessary isn’t the same as simple, is it?”
Komme’s laughter was sharp and barking, but she saw how it eased the tension in all the others’ faces. Except Wester’s. “Fair point, Lady Kalliam. If we’d wanted easy, we should have stayed home. Or all of you should have, at any rate. It isn’t as though I’ve left my house. Why don’t we drink a little wine and talk through this like it was a question of business. What do we have to work with?”
“All the money in the world,” Cithrin said, the phrase coming with a depth of meaning that Clara couldn’t entirely parse. Then she smiled at Clara with a brightness and sharpness that might have been genuine or an actor’s artifice. “And the mother of the Lord Marshal as an ally.”
“Well, one of those is better tested than the other,” Komme said. “But I follow you on both points. What else have we got?”
For the better part of an hour, they spoke. Much of it Clara followed—the letters written against the powers of the priests, the knowledge that the dragon Inys could provide, the dispositions of the Antean army and the forces rising in Elassae. Other points, like the peculiar relationship among Narinisle, Northcoast, and Herez mediated by the new “war gold” letters, she couldn’t quite parse, but she did her best to listen intelligently. A brown-pelted Kurtadam girl brought platters of glazed meat and soft cheese. A Firstblood boy with skin as dark as a Timzinae’s scales poured wine into thick crystal cups. The day flowed quickly into night until the fire couldn’t outpace the chill. When, at evening’s end, they parted, Barriath walked with her to the rooms the bank had set aside for her.
For a moment, she suffered a sense of displacement. Memories of winter nights in Osterling Fells while Dawson was off on the King’s Hunt mixed with something more recent—walking in unfamiliar halls with a young man. So much had changed in her life in so few years. And in herself.
“Well,” Barriath said as they came to her rooms, “and what did you make of your first council of war, Mother?”
“A very apt rehearsal for the real one,” she said, and Barriath chuckled. A Dartinae servant, his eyes glowing a gentle yellow, slid her door open with a bow.
“That was the real one,” Barriath said.
Clara paused in her doorway. He didn’t sound as though he were joking, and his face didn’t have the expression he employed when he was teasing. But she couldn’t take what he’d said seriously. When she spoke, she sounded scandalized, even to herself. “Without a representative of the crown?”
“Things are different since the bankers took over.”
The journey from Jorey’s camp to the great city of Carse had been unpleasant, but not overly long. Jorey had given them good horses and a sturdy cart. Nothing grand enough to attract the wrong kind of attention on the road. Coming so far and through so much only to be killed by bandits would have been absurd, but the world didn’t seem to shy away from absurdity now. If it ever had. Barriath had traded his disguise as Callon Cane for a servant’s robes and a cheap hat that drooped down on the sides to obscure his jawline. The winter roads were thinly traveled, and while the forces of King Tracian kept a close eye on the southern border, an old woman and her son weren’t a threat they feared. They had slept in merchant inns and public houses, keeping to themselves as much as they could. Barriath could pass for a man of no country, but the accents of the Antean court were too much a habit for her. She could no more deny her origins than explain them.