Isadau’s face went still and her inner eyelids fluttered in distress. Cithrin stepped forward, putting herself between the Timzinae woman and Paerin Clark by instinct. “Are you going to give them the money?”
“We can’t,” Paerin said. “If the holding company were to offer a loan to the throne of Birancour, we’d wake up the next morning with Herez, Narinisle, and Northcoast on our doorsteps demanding the same terms. Open that pipe, and it won’t close.”
Pyk nodded her approval, but Cithrin tilted her head. Something in the way he had said the words, and the words he had chosen, plucked at her. He didn’t meet her eyes. “When you say, We can’t, you mean the holding company.”
“I do.”
Pyk’s expression clouded and she sucked mightily at the gaps where her tusks had been. “You aren’t saying my branch ought to carry the burden.”
“I told her majesty’s master of coin that I was unfamiliar with the details of the branch, and would come to Porte Oliva and discuss what amounts might be available to contribute toward funding the defense of the realm.”
“Well,” Pyk said, “you can go right straight back up there and tell her majesty that defending the realm is her part of the bargain and paying the tax is mine. I’ve kept my end, now she can keep hers.”
“I think I might rephrase it,” Paerin said. “But I think first I will stall for as much time as we can manage. We’re in a bad position here.”
“Some foreign king has his cock in a twist,” Pyk said, waving her massive hand. “We haven’t even got a branch in his puffed-up empire. Let him stew. He won’t come here.”
“He will,” Cithrin said.
“The letters we’ve had from our nameless friend in Camnipol say the army is already on its way. It will be here before the middle of spring.”
“Army of stick men too damned tired to lift their own swords,” Pyk muttered. Isadau rose, stepped over to the Yemmu woman, and put a hand on her shoulder. Pyk sobbed once, and clamped her jaw. Cithrin had never seen the Yemmu woman frightened before. It shook her more than she’d imagined. She felt a sudden and unpleasant sense of protectivness toward her notary.
“We’ll stop them, then,” Cithrin said.
“That would be lovely,” Paerin said. “How do you propose to manage it?”
Cithrin took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. Geder was coming with swords, arrows, fire, and the spider priests. She had an accounting book and a strongbox of coins and jewelry. Perhaps she could hire a mercenary company. Or increase the bounties offered by the imaginary Callon Cane. Or…
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I will find a way.”
Paerin’s disappointment hissed out between his teeth. All four of them were quiet for a long moment. Carts rattled past in the street. A pigeon fluttered at the window and flew away. Cithrin folded her hands over her belly where the sick knot was tying itself tight in her gut.
“Work up a proposal,” Paerin said. “Send it to Carse when you have it. And we will see what we can do.”
“How long do I have?” Cithrin asked.
“I don’t know,” Paerin said. “It isn’t my deadline to set. Until Palliako’s forces come. Or until the queen decides to trade you for peace. You have all the time there is between right now and whenever it’s too late.”
He left that night, but Cithrin barely noticed. Her world narrowed to a single, overwhelming question: how to buy herself out of a war. She spent hours talking to Yardem Hane about the fine points of hiring mercenary companies: the distinction between guarding and a field contract, the structure of payments that was least likely to have the paid swords turn aside, the delays of travel and how to overcome them. She went through the bank’s books and ledgers going back as far as she could find, looking for any precedent that might apply. She reviewed the payments given out by Callon Cane, the estimates for fraud, the challenges of increasing the practice both in Herez and in other cities throughout the world.
Four days, she went without sleep. When Isadau came on the fifth day, Cithrin didn’t at first notice that the woman’s scales had an ashy dullness or that her movements were slow and careful. She didn’t see anything of Isadau’s sudden fragility until she spoke.
“I’m afraid we’re too late, dear. They’ve blockaded the harbor.”
Cithrin sat at her desk, blinking and confused. Which harbor? she thought. And then, Who blockaded it? How does that change the pricing? And then the sense of the words penetrated the armor of her focus, and she rose.
Viewed from the seawall, the Antean fleet looked like a busy day in port. Twenty ships ranging from the vast, canvas-strewn roundships to small, nimble-oared warships with bronze rams at their prows haunted the water just beyond the place where depth turned it a deeper blue. Fewer than half a dozen defending ships hunkered down in the bay. The harbor was too dangerous for the Antean fleet to traverse without a guide. The power and threat of the attackers was too great to permit any traffic to leave the port or enter it.
All along the seawall, men and women stood and gawked. A half dozen queensmen were shouting at one another as they assembled a ballista that hadn’t seen daylight in a generation. The sound of their voices in Cithrin’s tired ears was like the gabble of frightened chickens. Porte Oliva was under blockade. Antea had come by water, and no one would enter or leave the city that way. She knew that she should have been worrying about an army, a full siege, but all she could think was that the trade ships from Stollbourne would not come.
The implications spread out before her as clearly as and automatically as breath. The backers of the ships would all fail. Even if the cargo did manage to come in later, any loans used to finance them would have come due. If the goods landed at some other port and came overland, there would be tariffs and shipping, and bandits alerted to the possibility of wealth making its way down the dragon’s roads. All the insurance contracts would pay out, and anyone who had taken on too many would be crippled or driven out of the market…
“I’m damned,” Cithrin said. “Pyk was right about something.”
Marcus
What needs to happen,” the innkeep said, his expression soft and ruminative, “is they slit the Cinnae bitch’s throat and hang her on the wall as a warning to sluts.”
The other people in the common room, men and women both, added their voices to his in a chorus of support. There weren’t more than a dozen of them all told, but the violence of their fantasies made them seem more. Marcus leaned forward, looking into his cup. Across the table from him, Cary’s smile was empty and her eyes as hard as stones.
“From what I heard, she was working with the Timzinae from the start,” one of the other men said.
“All them Western Triad bastards are the same,” the innkeep said. He was a gentle-faced man, his voice soft and melodious. Any words he said, however harsh, seemed to take on a kind of philosophical sorrow. “Look different on the outside, but inside, they’re the same. Not saying they’re all like that Cinnae piece of shit. I’ve known some Cinnae were fine people. Just it was in spite of what they was, if you see what I’m saying.”
“Birancour’ll give her up,” a woman in the back said.
“Unless they were part of it all from the start,” the innkeep said. “All those roaches that scuttled out of Elassae headed west, didn’t they? There were caravans of them ready to go, and houses in Porte Oliva and Sara-sur-Mar already bought and fitted out for them.”
“No, really?” the woman said, pausing in her path.
“Oh yes,” the innkeep said. “Only reason Lord Geder didn’t root out all the conspirators was they knew he was coming and they had their retreats in mind. They’ll be running out of land soon, though. Then they can swim for blue water, and good riddance.”