The previous year’s battles had wounded the city, there was no question. Blades in the street and fires in the noblest quarters. Nothing like that could happen without leaving a mark. Only in the gardens and mansions at the northern end of the city did Clara see how it could be possible to view the worst as passed, the wounds as healing. Walk south and west far enough to reach the Prisoner’s Span, and the infection showed. It wasn’t only that there were more beggars, though certainly there were. It wasn’t only the merchants’ stalls closed and abandoned.
Palliako’s war against Asterilhold had taken the able-bodied men from the farms in planting, and the insurrection against him had distracted the noblemen from the business of managing their holdings. Now the armies fought in Sarakal, and another spring planting had almost passed with fewer hands than it needed. There was still bread at the bakers, meat at the butchers, beets and carrots at the carts along the streets, but there was also the growing sense that all the reserves had been spent. It felt like desperation, and it showed the most in the city’s desperate places—the Prisoner’s Span, the vagrant encampments that clung to the sides of the Division, Palliako’s new prisons. The places that had been beneath her notice and were no longer.
To her left, Vincen was talking to a thin older man. He glanced toward her then away, reassuring himself that she was still there, still well, in a way that could only remind her of a hunting dog checking on its pack.
“What’s happened to Oldug?” she asked, taking her pipe out from her pocket.
“Hauled him up early,” Aly said, bitterness in her voice.
“Hardly seems fair, does it? My boy in for taking a few bits of copper and staying his full time. Oldug was running his ship from Hallskar and back for five years before they put hands on him. Must have cost a hundred times what my boy did.”
“Is odd, isn’t it? What’s become of him since?”
“Not around here. Likely took his good fortune back to sea with him.”
“Or got pressed into service for the war,” Clara said.
“Or that.”
Clara took her tobacco pouch out before she remembered again that it was empty. She pressed it back, but Aly plucked the clay pipe out of her hand and started filling it from her own supply. Clara began to protest, but then stopped. It was rude to ask, but it was worse to refuse. A young man of status given a small command to Lyoneia. A smuggler shown leniency. The feeling it called forth in her was little more than a slight discomfort, an itch, but Clara sat with it patiently, and it grew into something larger and more complex. Suspicion, perhaps. Aly lit the pipe from her own match, drawing on it until blue smoke billowed from her lips, then passed it back to Clara. The leaf was old and stale-tasting, but after a few days of nothing it might as well have been ambrosia and incense. Clara puffed out a careful ring of smoke and watched it spin and diffuse while she thought.
“If you hear what happened to him, I would be interested,” she said. “Anyone else who’s been let out early and then gone too.”
“I’ll ask around if you’d like,” Aly said, leaning against the great stone abutment that gave the bridge its strength. “Anything else you’d want to know?”
Of course there was. She’d already gathered so much from so many places—the knights in the field from an old porter who had taken a position at the Fraternity of the Great Bear; the grain and fodder being diverted to the army from a disgruntled baker arguing with the miller who usually supplied him flour; the movements of the army from a dozen friends, lovers, and relatives of the soldiers. It was all there, floating through the city waiting only for a careful listener. But like drinking saltwater and growing thirsty, every question answered left her curious. What kinds of supplies were going south to Lyoneia with Nikayla Essian’s son. What other commands were being scattered to the odd places of the world and who was leading them. Whose sons they were taking with them, how many horses, and how much food. Her curiosity was piqued, and it would be days or weeks finding what she wanted to know, all of which might amount to nothing. She smiled at Aly and drew another sip from her pipe. Was there anything else she’d want to know? Only everything.
“No, dear,” she said. “Just an old woman feeding her idle fancies.”
“Not so old as that,” Aly said and cast a leering glance at Vincen Coe. Clara felt a moment’s stab of embarrassment, and then laughed. Across the little square, Vincen turned to look over his shoulder at them, checking in with his pack.
“He is pretty to look at,” Clara said.
They stayed there for the better part of an hour, Clara visiting and trading gossip with men and women she had come to know over the last months and Vincen following her lead. At last, the sun began to reach down toward the western wall of the city, and Vincen came to take her arm and lead her home to the boarding house.
“We should talk,” he said as they stepped into the shadowed alleyway. “I’m starting to get worried about staying in the city. I’d like to speak to my uncle about going out there for the summer.”
“That’s sweet,” Clara said. “No.”
“I’m afraid there’s going to be more trouble. Not right away, but soon.”
“All the more reason I should stay,” Clara said.
“It would be safer if—”
“I’m sure the letters I wrote from your uncle’s farmstead would be fascinating,” Clara said. “‘There may be more piglets this year than expected.’ No, if I’m going to do this, I have to do it from here.”
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t do it,” Vincen said. His voice was so gentle she almost laughed.
“Of course I’m going to continue with it. It’s what I have left.”
“You have me.”
This time she did laugh, and the flicker of hurt on his face was terrible and hilarious both. She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. The taste of his sweat was surprising and immediate, and Clara wondered whether she’d just crossed some unspoken boundary. And if she had, whether the boundary was his or her own. Vincen’s light brown eyes were fixed on hers, his cheeks flushed. She didn’t realize they’d stopped walking until someone passed them.
“My work’s here,” she said. “But I hope you’ll stay with me.”
“To avenge your husband,” Vincen said, and she could hear the complexity of sentiment in his words.
She shook her head and pressed two fingers to the huntsman’s lips. “To redeem my country,” she said. And then, a moment later, “By betraying it.”
Marcus
Looking back at it afterward, the journey from the heart of the Lyoniean rainforest to the rocks and crags of the northern coast took on the feeling of a dream. Marcus remembered bits and pieces—the bone-deep exhaustion, the day an annoying welt on his leg had opened and spilled out live maggots, the tension between taking time to search for food and pressing on to reach the end of the forest—but they formed no single coherent string. They had walked and hidden and been bitten and starved and tried to find water that wouldn’t fill their guts with worms when they drank it. When Marcus thought back to the morning he had stepped out from the trees and onto a paved road, his ribs showing through his skin and half naked where his clothes had rotted away, he saw the scene as if he had witnessed it, as if he had been outside of his own body watching it happen to someone else.
It was only on the ship back north that his mind returned to him enough that he understood. After months lost in the interior, he’d been starving and fevered and prey to insects that had been feasting on the blood of humanity since before the dragons. He told himself that the sword and its venomous magic likely didn’t have much to do with it. As weak as he’d been, he would likely have fallen just as ill, been just as confused. Still, as their little ship bobbed on the summer waves, Marcus left the green scabbard in with his things. He had no need of it on board, and less time carrying now meant more time later.