The hardships of following the army had served her well. She rose before dawn, her eyes opening while the still-dark sky betrayed nothing of the coming day, and traveled until twilight faded to dusk. Between the falling winter and their northern route, the light came late and left early. But the fighting had not reached Northcoast, and a mild autumn had left the granaries full, the harvest just passed still rich in memory. Clara had been greeted with as much generosity as suspicion, seen as much courage as fear. In time of war, it was more than she had hoped.
Her rooms at the holding company, home and hearth for Paerin Clark and the Medean bank, were less than the room she would have offered guests of her own in Osterling Fells, greater than she’d had in Abitha Coe’s boardinghouse in the poorer quarters of Camnipol. The bed was large enough for two, with a thin down mattress and wool blankets that she could lose herself in. The fire grate held a small blaze and the bricks held the heat for hours after the flames went out. The inner walls of the little keep bent in there, giving her something like a balcony that looked down on the inner courtyard, walled off by thick cedar shutters with oiled cloth in the joints to keep out the wind.
When she slept there, she dreamed of Dawson. Something about the cold or the voice of the wind, perhaps. In her dreams, he was neither alive nor dead, neither with her nor apart. Often she did not see his face or hear his voice. There was only a sense of his presence that faded when she woke. For the hour or so she sat alone with her tea and honeyed bread, wrapped in a robe as thick as tapestry, she would remember him. The names of his favorite dogs. His overwhelming contempt for Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. The way he’d taught Barriath and Vicarian and Jorey to fight and to hunt. The melancholy she felt then wasn’t for her own loss. She’d spilled her grief in strange places, and what remained was a complicated tissue of fondness and gratitude and guilty pleasure at who she had become.
Dawson had wagered his life that the world could be kept as it had been: static and unchanged. He had lost. These people of ledgers and sums would have been as vile to him as the foreign spider priests. For him, the world had had an order. To plan a war against a noble—and Geder wasn’t king, but he was certainly of noble blood—without its being between peers would have been unthinkable. He would never have done what she had chosen to do. She loved him for that. Worse, she was relieved that he hadn’t lived to see this.
And she missed Vincen Coe. Not simply as a man, not any man, but the one particular face and body and voice. The lover of her new life as Dawson had been the lover of her past one. Necessity had made leaving him behind with Jorey easy. Not pleasant, never that, but easy. Once one saw what had to be done, it simply had to be done. She’d needed to find Cithrin bel Sarcour, the enemy of her enemy, and hope to turn the fall of Geder Palliako into something other than the devastation of her country.
Perhaps it was even working. But as the first scattering of fat grey snowflakes swirled down from the white morning sky, she found herself picturing Vincen huddled in a cunning man’s tent. Cold. Still recovering from the wounds he had suffered. She wished him here, in relative safety. In her bed, where she could warm him and be warmed by him. And more than that. He was her one critical vice.
She knew, or thought she knew, what Antea would be if they failed against the spiders. And if they won? Who would she be then? Would she stand in the court by her remaining sons and turn her scandalous lover aside? Would she vanish into the low world at Vincen’s side and leave behind her children? Her grandchildren? All that she had built and loved and made?
No matter what, the nation she saved—if she saved it—wouldn’t be the one she’d known.
She filled her pipe thoughtfully, her thumb tamping the leaf into the bowl with the ease of long practice. She lit it from the fire, drawing smoke deep into her chest. When she breathed out, the smoke was as grey as the snow. She had to make a plan, but she couldn’t. Not by herself. Not any longer.
The shriek came suddenly, and from everywhere. She started, her fingers snapping the stem of her pipe. It came again, louder, and followed by a rushing sound like the voice of a great fire. Her breath shuddered as she stood. She shook, fears deeper and more primal than speech could form filling her mouth with copper, but she rose all the same. The shutters were frigid against her hand as she pulled them aside and stepped out onto the little balcony.
A vast shadow passed over her, blackness dotted white by snow-strewn air. The dragon dropped to the courtyard in the center of the keep, its war-tattered wings too wide to fully unfurl. It was magnificent and awing. Its dark scales defied the cold. Its massive head turned on a serpent neck. Clara had the sudden, powerful memory of going to court for the first time. A child of eight years faced by the splendor of a king.
A black wooden door opened far below her. A thin figure stepped out into the fallen snow. Cithrin bel Sarcour walked out to the dragon, notebook and pencil in her hand. The dragon folded his wings and settled before her. Clara couldn’t hear the girl’s voice at all, and Inys’s replies were bass rumbles, like a landslide with words in it. She watched them consult, the most ancient ruler of the world and the newest.
These are the allies I’ve picked, she thought as her toes and earlobes began to ache. Please God let me have chosen well.
Geder Palliako, Lord Regent of Antea
As he had been preparing for this last campaign, Geder’s father had come to see him. They’d sat in one of the gardens just within the grounds of the Kingspire, the huge tower rising up on one hand, the depth of the Division on the other. Lehrer Palliako, Viscount of Rivenhalm, had been the central man in Geder’s life, even when he was not present. Ever since Geder had become first the hero of Vanai, then Baron of Ebbingbaugh and then Lord Regent of Antea, he’d felt a little odd around him, as if his rise in court were somehow a reproach upon his father. It had struck him that day as they sat eating dried apples and fresh cheese how much older Lehrer had become.
A day would come, he realized, when he would be the Viscount of Rivenhalm himself. The idea had been both melancholy and wearying. He’d distracted himself and his father by outlining the hunt for the apostate. He’d done all he could to make it sound the grand adventure that it was, but Lehrer seemed only to hear the risk in it.
“Be careful out there, Son,” he’d said.
“I’ll be fine. I have Basrahip, and the men may not be the first pressing, but we have the goddess with us. We can’t lose.”
“Still,” Lehrer had said, “do be careful out there. And when you come back too.” Then he’d smiled and patted Geder’s knee as he’d done since Geder had been a child. “My good boy. My good, good boy. There’s more danger in court than on a battlefield, eh? Always remember that.”
Now that the fight was done, Geder found himself wondering what exactly the old man had meant.
Killing the apostate priests in the swamps of southern Asterilhold—or what had been Asterilhold before he’d conquered it—had been the final defeat of the darkness, the birth of the light. Geder, sitting alone in his private rooms in the palace at Kaltfel, thought it might have been a little more momentous.
From the way Basrahip had described things, Geder had imagined the apostate priest as a dragon in human skin. A being of darkness and violence and rage, bent on holding all humanity in a death-grip of lies. He’d imagined the man would be tall and graceful and threatening, honey-tongued like a villain in an old song. And his defeat would crack the world like the Division in the center of Camnipol. Split the earth itself down to its bones. And afterward, everything should have been light and hope and renewal. The world made right. The allies of evil slaughtered or else, if they’d been innocent, set free. That was the way those things were supposed to happen.