It was a humble room with a mattress laid out on the stone floor, an old iron brazier, and a low table so that Basrahip, sitting on the floor, could read and write the letters that he held in such contempt. Geder, in the doorway, cleared his throat. Basrahip looked up from the page in his hand and smiled.
“Prince Geder. It pleases me to have your company. Sit with me.”
Geder lowered himself to the floor with a soft grunt, his back pressed against the wall. The pile of papers on the little desk was thick as Geder’s palm and scattered enough that he could see letters written by half a dozen different hands. Basrahip followed his gaze and sighed.
“I had not thought when the goddess came again to the world it would require this of me,” the priest said. “I spend my days with dead words, empty of voices.”
“Being Lord Regent isn’t what I’d expected either,” Geder said. “And there’s hardly anyone I can talk with about it, too. I mean, Aster, I suppose, but he has enough to carry already. I don’t want to burden him with my problems. I suppose he knows, though.”
“He is a man who listens well,” Basrahip said.
“I’ve had reports from Jorey. The army’s moving west already. He sent ahead to Newport and Maccia, and the cities were entirely willing to give permission to move freely through their lands, so it looks as though he won’t have to fight his way across the Free Cities.”
“I am glad you are pleased with this.”
“What about you? Is this all messages from the temples?”
Basrahip nodded. “Much of it. They seek my guidance on many things, but they cannot hear my voice nor I theirs. And so we let our words die and send their corpses across the world.”
“It would be easier if you could really be there.”
“It would, but then I could not attend you as I promised. You are the chosen of the goddess, and so long as you have need of me, my place is here. But where there is confusion within your realm, more of my brethren are called for. Once all humanity has heard the truth of her voice, then her purity and her peace will follow.”
“Oh. Are things not peaceful, then? I thought everything was going well.”
Basrahip gestured at the letters, as if by their mere existence they showed the answer. “Her enemies are many, but none will withstand her. It was known that the children of lies would resist us. We spread as the light of dawn, and their resistance is powerless.”
“Still. It sounds annoying at least, eh?”
“Indeed,” Basrahip said with a rueful chuckle. “Also from our friend in the east. Dar Cinlama. He makes great claims, but his pages have no voice. They are shadows. Emptinesses. I long to hear his words and know.”
A Jasuru in the brown robes of the priests entered the room carrying a tray with a bowl of stewed grain and goat cheese and a cup of tea. Geder scowled, trying to place the man’s face, and felt a thrill of fear when he did. The assassin who’d tried to kill him on the road in Elassae and been taken by the goddess. He knelt before Basrahip now, his black eyes empty of all malice.
“My thanks,” Basrahip said, and the Jasuru priest bowed and left. Geder watched in silence until the sound of footsteps had faded.
“Is it safe? Having him here? I mean, he was planning to kill me. He did kill one of your priests, didn’t he?”
“That was before the goddess’s hand was upon him,” Basrahip said. “He will no more act against us than your cities will rebel. The truth of the goddess cannot be denied.”
“Well, that’s… that’s good.”
Basrahip took a spoonful of the stewed grain and slurped it. For a moment, Geder could imagine him as he might have been if it had not been for the goddess. A villager and goatherd in the Sinir mountains who might live a full life and die without seeing anything like a city. And here he was instead, in the center of Firstblood power in the world, sleeping on the floor and eating the same food he would have on the far side of the Keshet. Even if the goddess had given no other powers, that the man was here at all seemed miracle enough.
“And you, Prince Geder? Are you well?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” he said, knowing that Basrahip would shake his head slowly at the words even as the event occurred. “I’m not fine.”
“You will be,” Basrahip said. “Your wounds will heal.”
Geder felt a tug of hope, of something like relief. It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to make him want if more. “Are you sure of that? Because right now, it seems like they’ll all go on forever.”
Basrahip took another bite of his food and smiled around it. “Prince Geder, I am certain.”
Cithrin
Spring came slowly to Porte Oliva. For weeks, the winter chill hung on, breaking for a day or two or three, and then descending again upon the city. The rains that washed the streets and pulled the grey from the clouds into the gutters had a meanness to them Cithrin didn’t remember. Stray cats huddled under the eaves, glaring out at the people passing by with the hungry resentment of beggars. She went through the motions of being the woman she pretended to be. Dinners and meetings, contracts and letters of transfer. It was a sham in more ways than one. She pretended to have power when she had none, and she pretended to care, though she didn’t.
Cithrin’s thoughts were always and only upon the war, and so when the conversations in the taprooms and alehouses changed to some other subject—when the trade ships from Narinisle would come, whether the queen in Sara-sur-Mar was going to make her Herez-born consort official, how the governor of the city had changed the tariffs in response to pressure from the free city of Maccia—it took her by surprise and left her annoyed. A year ago, Sarakal and Elassae had been nations. Today, they were subjects of the Severed Throne. For most of the merchants and tradesmen of Porte Oliva, it was only a curiosity. Or at most one factor among many in the private calculations of their work.
The ivy that grew up the side of the bank’s guard quarters was brown and dead-looking, except for pale, green-fuzzed dots that would turn to leaves and flowers in the coming weeks. The stalls of the Grand Market sold winter wheat and woolen cloaks, but also seeds and bulbs and the lighter jackets and leggings that would soon come into use. By summer, the men and women of the city would be nearly nude from the heat and the dampness of the sea and the bulbs would be tulip blossoms. Everything would change, as it always did. The thought comforted Cithrin less than it would have, once.
She had returned to her old apartment over the counting house with its thin floors and the stairway that went down the side of the building. She visited the taphouse that had been her regular haunt before Suddapal, before Camnipol, before Carse. She’d been welcomed by the same serving girl, served the same beer. It felt wrong that so little had changed in the city when so very much had been transformed for her. Yes, Magistra Isadau was in the city. No, Marcus Wester was not. Despite the changes, the city was so much itself, so confident in its permanence that she could almost believe that her travels and adventures had been only a long, complicated dream. That was how little the war had touched Porte Oliva up to now, and some days she could almost pretend it would last.
“The trade ships from Narinisle?” she said, leaning her elbows on the table. “A month, I’d guess. It depends on the blue-water trade, and that varies.”