Dannien pressed his lips together until they went white. “Well,” he said. And then, “Shit.”
The coffeehouse looked out over the Division toward the ruin that was the Kingspire. For that matter, the ruin that was Camnipol. The whole city—carts and carters, beggars and bakers, everyone from the highest lord to the mange-hatted dog sulking at the alley’s mouth—had the half-stunned look of a man trying not to faint. But when Marcus glanced down into the chasm of the Division, past the bridges of wood and stone to the rope-and-chain contrivances below, he could see the ruins of other Camnipols. The city had been broken before, collapsed, and been rebuilt. This present stumble wasn’t the worst it had seen.
Cithrin, sitting at his side, drank her coffee and sighed. Yardem, sitting across from them both, stuck to beer. Marcus only wanted water. Since he’d stopped wearing the sword, an acuity was returning to his tongue that left it easily overwhelmed. He hoped that stage would pass too.
The staff of the little house walked around them like they were lions, as likely to claw the help as ask for bread. He supposed that was fair. Cithrin bel Sarcour, who had humiliated and ultimately destroyed the beloved or despised Lord Regent. Who had thrown down the false goddess or else brought the world into a new age of lies. Who had saved Camnipol or else debased it before the Timzinae. Aster had made it clear that she was under the protection of the Severed Throne, but Marcus kept at least one guard with her wherever she went. It was a little odd to realize that, killer of kings and hero of Wodford and Gradis, he wasn’t the most storied person at any table where he sat with Cithrin.
“Jorey Kalliam’s called the disband,” Marcus said.
“I heard,” Cithrin replied. “But I don’t think he’s planning to throw a triumph.”
“He should,” Marcus said. “If people pretend there’s a reason to celebrate, it won’t be long before they convince themselves it’s truth.”
Cithrin’s chuckle wasn’t much more than a low noise in her throat. It sounded like satisfaction. Marcus found himself smiling as well. Yardem… well, he seemed amused, but it was hard to tell with him sometimes.
Most of the morning had been spent in what they were calling a business meeting. For the most part, it was the same thing that came after any battle. Relief and fear and anger and more relief coming out in stories and jokes and fights. And the weird melancholy that came at the end of a contract. He’d never understood why the end of a war should carry that sense of rootless mild sorrow, but it did. Something about endings, even when what had ended, was awful.
Yardem had told the story of Geder’s death again. Marcus, his minimal description of killing Basrahip. Cithrin retold the attack against Inys, the death of Kitap rol Keshmet, the only good priest in the history of the world. Or maybe that was only Marcus being cynical. Hard to say. With every story, the sense that they’d actually come to a place of relative calm and safety grew. Yes, Dannien was leading the men south. Yes, the Timzinae slaves were freed, and their children—the ones who remained—were going back to Elassae. Yes, the spider priests were dead. And Geder Palliako with them. The bravery of Aster and their hopes for his reign. Jorey’s return. Clara Kalliam’s role in rallying the court. All the things that had happened and were happening and would come in the future, as certain as kittens in springtime. And then, like a child before sleep, Cithrin would ask a question or clarification that really meant “Tell me again,” and Yardem would. And Marcus would listen. And at the end, they’d begin again.
Though there was one part that kept catching on his mind like a splinter too small to see. Invisible still, but present…
“So that’s done,” Marcus said, lifting his cup toward the serving boy to call for more water. “What’s the plan from here?”
Cithrin smiled. “I’d thought that was obvious,” she said. “We won’t get a better opportunity. I’ve already written the letters to Paerin and Komme. We have to open a branch in Camnipol.”
“Of course you do,” Marcus said.
“The only way Aster will ever be able to pay reparations to Elassae and Sarakal is war gold,” Cithrin said. “And it’ll help build trust back with Northcoast and Birancour once they’re all part of the same system.”
“A temple,” Yardem said, “in every city she conquers.”
Probably, he was joking.
Cithrin
The war was over.
The thought couldn’t quite find its resting place in Cithrin’s mind. It rattled through her like the last dried pea in a jar. The war was over. The priests were gone, the goddess killed, Morade’s vengeance wiped from the world. Geder was dead. The war was over. No one was going to die at the edge of a sword today, or at least no one more than the usual. Her heart should have been all songs and celebrations, and perhaps it would have been, except she couldn’t sleep.
Now that’d she’d come out of hiding, the world around her had changed. She took rooms at the moral successor of the inn Paerin Clark had brought her to her first time in Camnipol. A lifetime ago. The new place was on the ruins of the old, and the halls still stank of fresh wood and paint. The rooms were larger, and the one she’d taken had its own little balcony that looked down on the street, a table for her to work at, if she had any work, an anteroom where her guard could sleep and make sure no one slipped in during the night to slit her throat. The keeper was an elderly Dartinae woman whose glowing eyes reminded Cithrin of the sun behind clouds. The keeper’s husband treated Cithrin and her guards like ambassadors from a powerful country, as perhaps they were. The morning sun greeted Cithrin with coffee and eggs, the night with wine and salt crackers. And more wine after that, without any hesitation or hint of disapproval. Despite all that, Cithrin felt like a six-legged pony trotted out for the amusement of the crowd.
The city and the kingdom—and perhaps the world—seemed in a moment of stillness, like the pause between breaths. They were between what had happened before and what would come next, and she was that uncertainty made flesh. Cithrin bel Sarcour, once the deadly enemy of Antea, and now confidant of Prince Aster and Clara Kalliam, her son Jorey. She was welcomed in the imperial court because Aster insisted on it, and because everyone there was shaken and frightened and ready for the world to be something different than it had been. So long as Cithrin held her head at the best angle, so long as she walked with authority and spoke with confidence, she would be assumed to have power. And so perhaps she did.
She traveled under guard always. Geder had stripped the court of any dissent or disloyalty. If he’d survived the plan, they might have been able to use that to steer the court. Now there would be some who still believed in his cause, since he was no longer there to disavow it. People would still call the Timzinae roaches, as they had before the priests had come. They would still look down upon them, as the Yemmu disdained the Tralgu; the Cinnae, the Kurtadam; everyone everywhere, the Drowned. The war was over, but humanity was still itself. The hatred might last forever. The injustice. The petty cruelty and moral blindness.
There was no call to believe that wars would not come again, and for reasons as obscure or justified, as they had without Morade’s spiders. Blood and innocent lives were still the currency of empires, as they had been in the absence of the priests.
But the spiders wouldn’t spread, and Cithrin was not yet done.
During the day, she made herself present at court and among the merchant class of Camnipol. At night, she sat in her room and drank until she fell into a stupor not so unlike sleep. Or walked the night-black streets in the center of a protecting square of swordsmen. Or sat in the taproom, beer in one hand, and watched the players there put on another version of The Butcher’s Daughter with the part of PennyPenny played by a sweet-faced Jasuru who seemed all too happy to mock his own race.