“He won’t say,” Sabiha said, “but it’s Geder. He hates Palliako, only he won’t permit himself to feel it, so it’s become this terrible sort of loyalty.”
“Geder’s been very kind to us, in his fashion. It isn’t every man who would put a traitor’s son in command of the army.”
“I suppose not.” Sabiha sighed. A vicious gust pressed at the windows and the smell of the weather seeped in around them like a perfume. “I’m afraid that even when the war ends, the man that comes back may not have much in common with the one that’s leaving. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do,” Clara said.
“Does it frighten you too?”
“It does. But not so much as the thought that the war might not end. Not ever. We may be chasing conspiracies and shadows for the rest of my life and yours. And his,” she added, gesturing toward her belly.
“Hers.”
Clara looked up into Sabiha’s smile.
“The cunning man says to expect a daughter,” the girl said. “Jorey won’t mind, do you think?”
“He will be delighted. He’s always been quite fond of girls.”
“I wish I could go with him,” Sabiha said. “Or if not that, I wish that you could.”
“One does not take one’s pregnant wife and aged mother on campaign,” Clara said. “I think it would be seen as unmasculine.”
“If you really want to take care of me, find a way to take care of him. There must be one.”
“I wish there were. At the moment, I’m not certain what that would mean,” Clara said, but a thought had begun to take form at the back of her mind. Camnipol was thick with the priests and the loose ends of her plots. It was not safe to stay. And with Sabiha asking her to look after Jorey, perhaps—perhaps—there was something that could be done.
Captain Marcus Wester
The great city of Rukkyupal squatted at the edge of the ice-slush sea. Massive grey walls of granite as thick as they were high marked the city’s perimeter, defending the men and women of Hallskar as much from storms as war. The port itself lay outside the walls with jetties of slime-green stone and docks of pale, fresh pine. There were no old piers in Rukkyupal; the violence of the weather was such that only dragon’s jade could have withstood it. Instead, there was a tradition of rebuilding what was lost, remaking what everyone knew would be destroyed and then remade again. If the motto above the city gates had been Endure and Create, it would have captured the soul of the city. Instead, the gates held worked letters in green brass that read HMANICH SON HMINA UNT, and no one Marcus had met knew what they meant.
The streets were broad and paved with brightly colored brick—yellow and green and red. Leather banners announced the businesses along the high streets and the temples and churches of a hundred different gods in the low.
The men and women of the city were almost exclusively Haaverkin. Great rolls of fat thickened their bodies and ink marked their faces. They walked through the breaking cold in light wools, brushing frost from their shoulders like it was dust. Of all the thirteen races of humanity, the only other that might have been at home in the city were the Kurtadam, and even they appeared to prefer the warmth of the south. A band of Firstblood actors coming to the city not from the south road or the port, but straggling in from the rural northern wastes, exhausted from the effort of simply not freezing to death, was as curious as finding a dozen bright-colored finches making nests at midwinter. Marcus and Kit and the players had arrived to stares of amazement and concern from the locals, and the near-universal assumption that they were all idiots.
Cary, her hair tied back, stood by the fire and looked out at the crowd, her breath coming in plumes. It wasn’t the largest of the public houses near the port, but it was the warmest. The hearth was built from clay with bits of colored glass in it that let through some of the fire’s light. Like the city itself, Marcus thought, it should have been ugly and wasn’t. The Haaverkin sat at their tables, watching her. Hornet knelt at her side, tuning a small dulcimer. He looked up at her, nodded, and lifted the little hammers. With the first notes he struck, Cary’s voice lifted, her expression cleared. Marcus, huddled beside Master Kit at the back of the room, thought she looked miserable, chilled, and unhappy. He also knew that anyone who hadn’t traveled the length and breadth of the world with her wouldn’t see it. The joy in her performance only seemed artificial to him because he had seen her joy unfeigned.
“Something to drink?” Kit asked. Marcus shook his head. Kit looked over at the Haaverkin boy who served the tables and lifted one finger. The boy nodded and trundled back toward the serving room, returning in a moment with a mug of steaming wine. Kit gave the boy the price of the drink and a couple of coins besides, then cradled the cup in his hands and sat forward.
“Are you actually going to drink that?” Marcus asked under his breath.
“I may not,” Kit said. “I suspect thawing my fingers with it may be the best I can hope for.”
The winter had been mild, and the spring early. Meaning, apparently, that the sea had only been a sheet of ice as solid as stone for three weeks and was breaking into pieces already, and the older seamen were talking about the mildness as a thing of supernatural import, leaving Marcus to reflect not for the first time that their little troupe had survived Hallskar more by luck than skill. Even so, the waves bore rough balls of ice the size of a man’s torso, and the sound of the surf was like a permanent battle. This was Rukkyupal, and the ships at the port were ready to set sail through the grinding, violent waters.
The day before, Kit and Marcus had braved the docks and found a little roundship whose captain, a swarthy Haaverkin with leaf-shaped tattoos on his forehead and cheeks, was preparing his ship. Kit, with the influence of the spiders in his blood, had been the one to make the enquiries, and Marcus stayed at his side in case something unforeseen and violent happened.
“Where are your lot looking to ship to, then?” the captain shouted over the cacophony of the ice.
“We were hoping for Antea,” Kit said. Years on the boards gave his voice power enough that he sounded as though he were merely speaking. It was a good trick.
The captain laughed. “It’s all Antea now. Used to be I might go to Sarakal or Asterilhold. These days, it’s nothing but Antea from here to Northcoast. Or Narinisle. Won’t be long before it’s them too, as I make it out. Here too, for that.”
“Do you think so?” Kit asked. If there was dread in his voice, Marcus only heard it because they’d been traveling together so long. “Will the war come here?”
At the ship, a young Haaverkin woman in a light leather jacket took a pole from the dock, shook it, and began scraping hunks of ice from the ship’s side at the waterline. Marcus admired the strength required for the task. Give the woman a pike and an afternoon’s training, and she could take down a charging horse. Taking Hallskar would be no easy thing, even with the advantage of the spiders. But the captain only laughed.
“Won’t need to, will it? No, I’ve got a cousin works for Sannisla of Order Coopish. He says the High Council’s already drafted up agreements. They’re like a third-catch fisher boy with his nets on his shoulders just waiting for the girl to ask.”
“What sorts of agreements?” Kit said.
The captain looked annoyed at the question, as if the answer were obvious. “Fealty. Only a question of time before the bastards at Camnipol decide they want us too, and the High Council figure we’d just as well take their taxes and temples friendly like. It’s where it’d end up anyway, and fealty leaves us be otherwise. Don’t care to share a slave pen with a bunch of Timzinae.”
In the end, they’d paid for passage to a low port near Sevenpol, and by midday the acting troupe had brought the cart to the dock and were breaking it down. The sides slid off their hinges and folded together. The racks of costumes and musical instruments and fake swords and crowns and chalices packed into chests. Everything the company owned was compressed small enough to carry up the gangplank and stow in the roundship’s hold. Hornet and Smit, Sandr and Charlit Soon, Cary and Kit and Marcus himself. As with many of the little contrivances of the theater, Marcus was impressed by the simplicity and elegance of the design. The little rack of blunt swords and trick daggers lifted from the frame and slid into the bottom of a crate without enough room for a fingernail between it and the wood. The cart’s wheels came off their axles with a twist and a kick. Everything about the theater cart was made to make movement easy, to keep from being in a single place for too long. All that they kept out were a few simple props and instruments they could use to earn a few coins before the ship set out, and the poisoned sword Marcus took from among the false blades and strapped across his back. It had been weeks since he’d had to wear the thing, and the skin of his back itched a little at the venomous thing’s return. Still, if something went wrong with the ship, he didn’t want to take another season tracking it down or diving for the wreckage, and it wasn’t as though the dragons were forging new ones to pick up in the market square.