Marcus stood.
The keep looked over to him, eyebrows raised in polite query. “Need anything else there, friend?”
“Just going to stretch my legs and check on the others,” Marcus said.
“Well, if there’s anything else you need, just say it. We’re all looking forward to the play tonight. Sent my boy down to Lesser Bronlet to spread the word. We should have a full yard, and no mistake.”
“Kind of you,” Marcus said.
They had thought to travel through Antea by avoiding the main roads and attracting as little attention as was plausible for a theater troupe. They could not have done much better. The town was hardly more than a cluster of houses at a place where dirt paths crossed. The dragon’s road ran ten miles to the northwest, carrying most of the carts and carriages between Sevenpol and Camnipol. Without it, the merely human paths and roads that laced the plains and farmlands of Antea might have earned the dignity of pavement. But the eternal jade was so near and so effortless that the need never rose above the effort required. The land all around was the fresh green of springtime, the days warm, and the nights not quite cold enough to freeze. After Hallskar, it felt like the jungles of Lyoneia all over again.
Antea itself had altered. Marcus had walked its length already in his life, and while the shape of the land, the accent of the voices, and the flavors of the food remained the same, there were changes that soured all the rest of it. It wasn’t only that it was near to a starving spring. Those came from time to time, and then they went. A blight might cause it, or a rogue storm. Or a war. The men who had farmed these lands were soldiers now, and some had been since the invasion of Asterilhold. The labor to manage the lands had been spent elsewhere, until now. The planted fields that the players passed were tilled. The first sprouts of a bountiful summer were pushing through the dark soil. That hadn’t changed. But the men who worked the lands weren’t Firstblood farmers, subjects of the Severed Throne. They were Timzinae, and they were in chains.
The first time they’d seen it had been half a day out of the port of Sevenpol. There had still been snow on the ground then, and the morning ground was covered with frost. The horse Master Kit had bought, using his unnatural magics to negotiate a price so low it was barely fair, had hauled the reconstructed and creaking cart down a long, tree-lined road, heading toward the wide jade of the dragon’s road, and then south. Charlit Soon had been huddled on the driver’s bench, Marcus and Smit walking beside the wide, slow, turning front wheel. To their right, an old Firstblood man had been in the middle of a field, screaming in anger. The boy absorbing his abuse was perhaps as old as Magistra Isadau’s nephew. The Timzinae was stripped to the waist and shivering. The morning light played off his dark scales. The old man brandished a whip made from thorn branches, not striking the boy—not yet—but terrorizing him.
Marcus had seen the shock in Smit’s face. The actor was a man of good years who’d been walking the world for most of them. Marcus knew he’d seen ugly sights before, and that he would again. Scenes like it had played all through the countryside. A tree in the middle of a half-tilled field with five Timzinae men tied to it by the neck like dogs. A dead Timzinae woman, abandoned by the side of the road, her back split open by some violence Marcus hadn’t seen. But no children. That had been the Lord Regent’s great plan. Take the children of Sarakal and Elassae as insurance of their enslaved parents’ good behavior. It left all of them ready to see Antea’s far border, and Marcus only hoped when they crossed it things would be better. Not here, of course. Antea had declared the Timzinae inhuman—dragons fashioned in human form and thus the ancient enemy of the spider goddess. The atrocities would continue, but since Marcus didn’t know how to stop them, at least he didn’t want to watch.
In the yard outside the little inn, Kit and Sandr had lowered the side of the cart, making the little stage where they would put on their show. Hornet was placing small, dense candles in tin cups that would throw back the light all around its edge. Marcus nodded to him as he hauled himself up and into the cramped space behind the soft red curtains at the stage’s back. Kit was in the long purple robes sewn with spangles at the edge that would transform him into Kil Hammerfrost, tragic king of the imaginary Kingdom of Clouds. Sandr was hunched down over a little mirror of polished metal, putting on eye-grease and rouge to become the sickly Prince Helsin, and applying it a little too thickly, Marcus thought. He shook his head.
Marcus Wester had been the most celebrated general in Northcoast, and its most feared regicide. He had trekked across two continents to confront a goddess who didn’t exist and woken a dragon from the age of legend. And with all those marvels and terrors, that he had strong opinions about men’s eye-grease still had the power to astonish him.
“What news?” Kit asked.
“Good news is we likely know where Cithrin and Yardem have gotten themselves to. The common wisdom puts them in Porte Oliva, probably under blockade but not siege. At least not yet. The bad news is all of Antea wants her killed slow for hurting the Lord Regent’s feelings or some such.”
Sandr raised a rouged sponge toward his cheek, paused, and set it down.
“I assume we won’t be continuing to Suddapal,” Kit said.
“I was thinking we could go back up the dragon’s road, take it though Camnipol, then south to the Free Cities. Perhaps try the pass at Bellin in summer for a change,” Marcus said. “The worst of the fighting is still the siege at Kiaria, and that could last another year or more, depending on how the water supply is in the caves.”
“And then?”
Marcus shrugged. “Take our best guess and try it. Same as always.”
“I’m afraid it may have gone too far to stop,” Kit said.
“Then we’ll get everyone on ships for Far Syramis and try to keep it confined to this side of the ocean,” Marcus said. “If that doesn’t work, we can try to find some mountaintop with a good stream, build a few houses, and kill anyone who shows up unexpectedly.”
Kit’s smile was dark. “I think that sounds uncomfortably plausible.”
“That’s me,” Marcus said, tapping his temple with two fingertips, “always thinking ahead.”
“I don’t think I can go on tonight,” Sandr said. His voice was wet and choked. His eye-grease was trailing down his cheeks in tiny black lines of tears. “I don’t think I can play for these people.”
Kit and Marcus exchanged a glance, and Marcus knelt down, putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “This isn’t the place to make a stand. Time will come. I don’t know where yet, and I don’t know when, but it will come.”
Master Kit’s voice was warm and gentle, and it carried a power more than only the words. “You can do this, my friend. Listen to me. It is within your power.”
Sandr was silent for a moment. He shook his head. “Do I have to?”
“We don’t want to stand out,” Marcus said. “Right now, we’re a bunch of Firstblood actors wandering through a nation of Firstblood people. As long as that’s what they see, we’ll be fine. If they find out, for example, that Kit and I were working with Cithrin in Suddapal or that we tried to slaughter their new favorite goddess? Well, then being in the fields with our Timzinae friends will be the best thing we could hope for. Keep calm, and keep quiet, and let’s all get through this bit alive.”
“So just accept it?” Sandr asked.
“Pretend to,” Kit said.
Sandr blinked up at the old actor. His half-painted, tear-smeared face was a mess, the illusions of color and light, pale powder and rouge ruined. He swallowed. “How long can you pretend to be something before you aren’t pretending anymore?”