She snuffed out the lanterns and stacked the wax trays with her notes in a corner with a strip of red cloth that would tell the servants to leave them undisturbed. The sensual music of reed flute and sanded drum that made their hymns murmured even in the darkness of midnight. More than any other race she knew, the old men and women of the Timzinae turned away from sleep. The compound—indeed the five cities of Suddapal—only rested. They never slept. She found herself drawn toward the music and the promise of company and warmth, but it was an illusion. She didn’t know the songs. The snapping of her pale, soft fingers wouldn’t give the sharp percussion of Timzinae hands.
She wondered if Yardem was on guard duty. Or any of her little retinue from Porte Oliva. She wondered where Cary and Sandr and Hornet were tonight. She wondered what Captain Wester was doing and what would make him think that Yardem Hane would ever betray him. She wondered where Geder Palliako slept that night and if he ever thought of her. She hoped he didn’t.
In her own room, the servants had left a lamp burning low. Her window let in a spray of moonlight, the cool blue mixing with the gold of the flame. She changed into her night clothes and slipped her legs beneath the thin summer sheets, sitting with her back against the wall.
Sleep wouldn’t come. She already knew it. She could lie in the darkness and stew in her own thoughts or turn up the lamp and read through the essays and histories Magistra Isadau had assigned her along with the books of the bank. Both options sounded equally unpleasant. For an hour she only sat, listening to the fire mutter in its stove, the distant whisper of drums.
She rose sometime in the darkness well after midnight, turning up the lamp’s wick more for variety’s sake than from any real desire. The floor cooled her feet. The papers waited on her bedside table, held down against the breeze by the old dragon’s tooth. Cithrin lifted it now, running her finger idly along its serrated edge, as she considered the writing beneath without really caring what it said.
The war was coming. It was all happening again, just the way it had in Vanai. She could feel it like a storm. The blades of Antea wouldn’t be stopped. As much as she wished otherwise, she knew the violence would spill past Sarakal. Perhaps to Elassae. Or into Borja. Or turn west toward Northcoast and Birancour. It was like a fire. She might not know where the flames would jump, but wherever it landed it would burn. And Magistra Isadau knew it too, as much as she pretended doubt. Cithrin understood the impulse to pretend the danger away. She’d done it herself in Vanai, and she’d had so much less to lose. Isadau had family—sister, brother, nieces, nephews, cousins. Cithrin had only had Magister Imaniel, Besel, Cam. Or perhaps it was the same. Losing everything was still losing everything, however little someone began with.
But Herez? Hallskar? Lyoneiea? None of them shared a border with Imperial Antea. Perhaps Geder and his counselors were looking farther ahead, to a wider, greater conquest. She tapped the dragon’s tooth against her palm. The thought didn’t sit comfortably. There was something else. Something about the dragon’s roads and the places they didn’t pass through.
Understanding came to her with an almost audible click. She stood up, her heart racing and a grin pressing her lips. She didn’t even pause to throw a cloak over the night clothes. The dragon’s tooth firmly in her hand, she strode out into corridors darker than mere night. Her footsteps didn’t falter. She knew the path.
Magistra Isadau was in her office chamber, reclined on a divan with a book open on her knees. She looked up without any sense of surprise as Cithrin entered the room.
“May I see the new report again?” Cithrin asked.
The Timzinae woman marked her place and closed her book. Opening the strongbox was the work of a minute. Cithrin took up the pages, turning them silently until she found the passages she sought.
A small group to Borja, led by someone named Emmun Siu. Two groups to Lyoneia under Korl Essian. And one to Hallskar, led by Dar Cinlama.
Dar Cinlama, the Dartinae adventurer who had once given her a dragon’s tooth. Cithrin tapped the page.
“Something?” Magistra Isadau asked.
“These aren’t scouting groups for the armies,” Cithrin said. “They’re looking for something.”
Clara
Someone in the house was screaming. Clara found herself out of her bed before she had wholly woken, wrapping the thin summer blanket around her waist, alarm running through her blood. The sound was constant, barely pausing to draw breath. A woman, she thought, or a child. Her first thought was that one of the new maids had encountered Dawson’s hunting dogs again. Except that was wrong, because Dawson was dead, and the dogs sent back to Osterling Fells or set loose in the streets. Somewhere nearby, a door slammed open or perhaps closed. Footsteps pounded down the hall. Clara dropped her blanket and snatched up the pewter candlestick from beside her bed, holding it in a clenched fist like a tiny club. She willed away the last confusion of sleep and prepared herself for the onslaught, whatever it was.
A man’s voice came from just outside the door of her rooms. Vincen Coe.
“My lady?”
“Vincen? What’s happening?”
“Stay where you are. Bar the door. I will return for you.”
“Who’s hurt? What’s going on?”
The man didn’t answer. His footsteps went away down the corridor, then to the rough stair at its end before being lost under the shrieking. Clara hesitated in the darkness. Only the faintest moonlight shouldered its way through her window, and the room hadn’t lost the stale heat of the day. The air felt close as a coffin. She put down her candlestick and walked to the door. The rude plank that assured her privacy was already in its brackets, but she put her hands to it all the same, as if touching the wood might assure her safety. The screaming paused, and masculine shouts took their place. She winced at each new sound, then strained at the silences. Footsteps pounded across the floor below her, and a man shouted once, wordlessly, but in triumph. It wasn’t a voice she knew.
Her rage surprised her. The sane thing, the right and expected one, would be to stay where she was, cowering in the heat and gloom and hoping to be overlooked by violence. For most of her life, it was what she would have done. With both hands, she heaved the plank up, then dropped it to the floor, and then stepped back for her candlestick, making a short internal note to herself that provided she lived to see morning, she would want a weapon of some sort in her bedroom in the future. A cudgel, perhaps.
The woman’s voice was screaming again, but there were words in it now. Vulgarities and threats. Clara made her way down the hall, her chin forward and her head high. The sharp sound of metal against metal announced swordplay, but she didn’t pause. As she marched down the stairs, the screaming resolved itself. Abatha Coe, the keeper of the boarding house. Her voice came from the kitchen. Clara pushed her way in.
The ruddy light of the open stove showed two Firstblood men, young and thin, their ragged beards hardly enough to cover their naked throats, holding Abatha on her knees while she screamed. An older Kurtadam man, broad across the shoulders, his pelt shining red in the firelight, was loading haunches of meat into a rough canvas bag. Vincen lay on the floor, a fourth man—also a Firstblood—kneeling on his shoulder blades, pinning him in place. Vincen’s sword was in the kneeling man’s hands.
“What,” Clara said in the stentorian voice she kept for intimidating servants, “is the meaning of this?”
As if for punctuation, she swung the candlestick against the kneeling man’s head, just above the ear with as much power as the close quarters allowed. The pewter candlestick jarred her fingers, the kneeling man yelped and put a hand to his ear, and chaos erupted. One of the men restraining Abatha let go and turned toward Clara, drawing a cruelly curved dagger. Vincen surged forward, reaching for his sword, the kneeling man struggling to get back atop him before he could. Abatha screamed, wrenching herself around, trying to free her one trapped arm.