“Change your mind, ma’am?”
Sorrow bloomed in her and she moved in, hugging the Tralgu close for a moment before letting him go. “Thank you for trying. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it that you care. But this is what I have to do. I don’t like it and I don’t want it, but this war is what we have. You were the one who told me sex is a woman’s natural weapon.”
Yardem’s ears shot forward.
“I never said that,” he said.
“You did. You’ve just forgotten. It was when we were first going from Vanai to Porte Oliva. We were training, and I kept asking what was a woman’s natural weapon. You said sex was.”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t. We were talking about fighting, and I made the point that on the average, men have longer reach and stronger arms, and weapons are based on reach and strength. A woman who wants to fight has to train harder to come even. I can’t recommend using sex in a melee.”
They were silent for a moment. Something was shifting in Cithrin’s chest. Unwinding like tie rope on a spool losing its tension.
“But,” she began and then wasn’t sure where to go.
Yardem scratched his chin reflectively. “Sling, maybe. Or a short sword. Not sex.”
“But you said—”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Then who did?” Cithrin asked.
“Believe that was Sandr.”
“Oh,” Cithrin said. Then a moment later, “Sandr’s kind of a pig.”
“I’ve always thought so.”
Cithrin looked down. The unwinding sensation in her chest intensified. Something in her was releasing, opening. It felt nauseating and it felt like relief. She pressed her lips together and looked up into Yardem’s face. His expression was as placid and calm as ever.
“Yardem?” she said. “I can’t do this.”
“No, ma’am. You can’t. There’s a ship waiting. I’ve given word to everyone that we’re leaving, so they won’t be caught unprepared. Enen’s packed up all the books and ledgers from the office. We can get whatever else you’d like, but we should hurry. The tide’s going out in two hours.”
Cithrin looked around her room. Her heart was beating fast and strong and true. She plucked the little plant from off her windowsill.
“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The ship was small with a shallow draft and wide sails. It slipped away from the dock seeming to go faster than the wind that carried it. Cithrin stood on the deck. She still had the green dress, but Enen had given her a thick cloak of leather lined with wool that she’d wrapped around her shoulders. The sea was choppy with a million tiny waves jittering and seagulls wheeling in the high air. They didn’t have the weight to smooth the swell and drop of the sea, and one of the house guards that Yardem had brought with them was being noisily sick over the side. Cithrin’s stomach, on the other hand, felt more solid and calm than it ever had. She was even hungry.
Suddapal receded. The great dark buildings greyed with distance. The great piers that pressed so far out into the water shrank to twigs and the tall ships became small enough to cover with her outstretched thumb. When she looked down into the water, she was surprised to see dark eyes looking up at hers. A pod of the Drowned had grabbed on to the ship, coasting with it like an underwater tail. Cithrin smiled at them and waved. One waved back, and before long, they had let go and fallen back into the depths of the water. By the time the sun fell into the sea, the city was gone.
And if she ever went back there, it would still be gone.
She felt Yardem come up behind her more than heard him. When she glanced back and up, he was standing there placidly, looking out at the pale white wake drawn out behind them and the darkening water.
“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m about to disappoint the Lord Regent. I don’t imagine he’ll take it well.”
“To judge from his past, likely not,” Yardem said.
“Perhaps I should have left him a letter.”
“Saying what, ma’am?”
“I don’t know. That I’m sorry. That I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Not sure that matters, ma’am.”
“It does to me. He’s a terrible person, you know. But he’s also not. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who managed to make himself so alone.”
Yardem grunted, then cleared his throat. “I’ve known hermits, ma’am. Very few of them burned down cities.”
“Fair point,” Cithrin said. “Still, I wish there was some way to talk just with the best parts of him.”
“Could wish that of anyone,” Yardem said.
The boat rose and fell gently. Rose and fell. It would be weeks yet before she reached Porte Oliva and home. She wondered what it would be like, hearing Pyk Usterhall’s rough, angry voice and sitting with Maestro Asanpur with his single blind eye and his perfect coffee and all the familiar faces again. She wanted to believe that she would fit back into the same place she had before, that she would find them as they had been, but she doubted it would happen.
She saw now that she had changed, though she still didn’t quite understand what she’d become. There was a contradiction in it, because Yardem was right. A year before, she would have been able to go through with it, and now she couldn’t. She had become capable of fewer things, and yet she felt freed. She wondered if Magistra Isadau was waiting in Porte Oliva. It was the sort of question that she could answer if anyone could.
“If I’d stayed,” she said. “If I’d been his lover, do you think he might have changed?”
Yardem stood silently for a long moment, his arms crossed and his ears canted forward.
“No,” he said.
Clara
Well, it’s mostly the bits the butcher usually throws away, but there’s enough salt in it, anyway,” Aly said, putting the soup bowl in front of Clara.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Clara said, picking up her spoon.
“I’m sure it’s not,” the other woman said, laughing. “But the company makes it better, eh?”
Aly lived in a small apartment on the fifth story of a narrow building. Her table was small enough that it was cramped even just with the two of them. The weak winter sunlight pressed in through dingy curtains and made the place seem warm and cozy, even though it was in fact almost as cold as the street.
With the court gone from Camnipol and the winter turning the black-cobbled streets to grey, Clara had given more time to the friends she’d made at the Prisoner’s Span. Ostin Soukar, the odd little man who kept forcing his way into homes that weren’t his, and being caught by the magistrates’ men because he’d fallen asleep there. Ishia Man, who was sweet as honey sober but fought like a bull when he got drunk. Aly Koutinen and her son Mihal. They were criminals, and some of them violent. There were many, many people she had met and spoken with whom she’d not choose to be in a room alone with, but taken as a whole, they were not particularly better or worse than the noblemen who debated at the Great Bear and fought in the dueling yards.
“Did you hear about Sasin?” Aly said.
“No,” Clara said, sipping at the weak, watery soup. “And I don’t dare to ask what’s happened this time.”
“Tried to take the begging cup from that one-legged Tralgu sets up by the northern gate. You know the one? Well, the one-legged bastard hopped up on his one foot and beat poor Sasin blue with his cane. Now they’re both in the pens with all those roach babies.”
“Well, warmer than the cages, at least,” Clara said.
“Don’t know,” Aly said. “I’d rather take my chances with the wind than live around Timzinae. I think it’s wrong to put them in gaols with real people. Animals live in a menagerie, and they’re all just a kind of dragon that got made short and stupid. I say put ’em where they belong. Bread?”