Yardem was waiting in the square outside the Governor’s Palace watching a cunning man conjure fire for a group of children. The prisoners of the city stood or sat on their platforms all through the square and the upright citizens came by to jeer at them or, if they were family, give them food and wash them where they’d soiled themselves. If it could have kept the army from her door, she’d have traded places with any of them. Yardem fell into step with her, his earrings jingling as they walked. For almost half of the way back to the counting house, he was quiet. When he did speak, it was in the offhanded tones of common conversation.
“Went poorly then.”
“I need wine.”
“Need, or want?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
They stopped at the taproom, but there were too many people there, and Cithrin felt like they were all whispering about her when she wasn’t looking. She paid for a jug of wine, carried it back to her rooms, and sat on her bed, drinking with the steady, studied pace of long acquaintance. The wine turned her mind fuzzy, but it didn’t untie the knot in her belly the way she’d hoped it would. She might need to send Yardem out for a second jug.
Geder’s letter was in among the papers of the bank. She took it out again, handling the paper with the care of a street performer with a snake.
Oh, this is so much harder to write than I thought it would be. Jorey says I should be honest and gentle, and I want to be. Cithrin I love you. I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known.
How many women in the Antea court would have cut off toes to have a letter like this one from the most powerful man in their empire? How many could have given Geder the sex that he mistook for love and made the same mistake themselves? And if they both thought it, maybe that made it true. She took another mouthful of wine, this time straight from the jug. If only there had been some way to transfer the affection, if that was what it was, the way responsibility for a contract or a loan could be shifted. A letter of transfer, where she could have assigned the burden of Geder’s infatuation to some baron’s daughter in Sevenpol or Anninfort. Only, of course, then she couldn’t have used his affection to shield her work in Suddapal, and hundreds more people would have died or suffered in slavery.
I want to sit up late at night with your head resting in my lap and read you all the poems we didn’t have when we were in hiding. I want to wake up beside you in the morning, and see you in daylight the way we were in darkness.
“Cithrin?” Isadau said from the top of the little stairway. Cithrin hadn’t heard her come up.
“Why is it,” she said instead of hello, “that the most passionate letter I’ve ever had and maybe ever will have makes me want to curl up under a rock and never come out?”
“Because it was written by an unstable tyrant who kills innocent people on a whim,” Isadau said, walking into the room.
“Ah. That.”
“Yardem said you didn’t speak of the meeting.”
“What’s to say? They want the money. If I don’t give it to them, they’ll feed me to Geder in exchange for peace. If I do give it to them, they’ll feed me to him just the same. I’m not in manacles right now because I haven’t said yes and I haven’t said no. And I can keep that going until they feel certain that I won’t give them the coin. After which…”
Isadau sat beside her on the bed and scooped Cithrin’s hand in hers. The pale, smooth Cinnae fingers knotted with the black Timzinae scales. They looked like art. “After which,” Isadau said softly, “they feed you to him.”
“Not seeing a path I like in this.”
“Give them some. A little. Promise them more if they give you time.”
“I can’t,” Cithrin said, her voice breaking. Maybe the wine had had more effect than she’d known, because there were tears in her eyes now and her shoulders were shaking. It was a stupid reaction. It didn’t change anything. “I need that money if I’m going to beat him. Everything depends on our having the gold to pay for all of it. So we can beat him.”
Isadau nodded, her knuckles squeezing gently, gently against Cithrin’s own. Her voice was half hum and half singing. “You know, dear. You know that you know. Stop now.”
“I can do this. I can find a way to stop him.”
“You did find a way. You found a dozen ways. But?” It was an invitation to admit the truth they’d both known for days. For weeks. Since the first day of the blockade, and possibly earlier even than that. Cithrin felt the words in her throat like vomit. And then she relaxed. Surrendered. Let hope die.
“We don’t have enough coin,” Cithrin said.
“If we had all the money in all the branches and the holding company and more besides, we might still not,” Isadau said.
“There has to be a way.”
“No, dear. There doesn’t. Some things even gold cannot solve.”
Clara
From the road to the stand of trees fifty feet from it, the land was scarred and churned to mud. Even the jade of the dragon’s road was dimmed, covered over by thick, sticky earth. Clods with grass still clinging to them peppered the landscape. The air stank of smoke and shit. The trilling birdsong and the high, rain-washed blue of the sky seemed incongruous, given the destruction. Clara pulled her horse to a stop gently. She had the feeling of walking into a tomb. Here something terrible had happened, and the world was marred by it. Made worse.
Vincen went a bit farther before he realized that she’d stopped. He turned in his saddle to look back at her. His eyes spoke his concern. She took her reins tight and shook her head. The braided leather between her fingers seemed more real to her because of the carnage all around. A dog was pawing at the ground just south of them, digging at something. It looked up at them with a wary curiosity as Vincen turned back and cantered to her side.
“My lady?”
“What happened here?” she asked. “Was there a battle?”
Vincen looked around, as if seeing the destruction for the first time. His laugh was short, mirthless, as much an expression of sorrow or anger as anything gentler. “No, Clara. There’d be bodies. This is where they camped. Perhaps a night ago. Not more than two.”
“They only camped? All this?”
“All this,” he said, and nodded toward the road ahead. Clara started forward, and he fell into place beside her.
Dawson had told her any number of stories about his adventures in the field, but they had all been stories of battles or camp humor. The time he had faced down Uric Saon, the leader of the little slave rebellion in the south, and scared him so badly he’d offered to sell Dawson his own men. The siege at Anninfort, and how it had ended. The night he’d been on campaign with Simeon back when he’d only been the prince and they’d started a poetry contest with the men that went so long they didn’t sleep before the battle. He had, she was certain, softened much of the worst of it. When he talked of the violence his voice had taken a calmness, a care, that spoke as loud as shouting that he was reluctant to tell her everything. But even with that, she’d built the image of war being like a kind of long, terrible King’s Hunt, with men as the prey.
The violence of an army’s mere passage, the damage to the land that soldiers, servants, horses, and carts left behind them merely by being had never entered her mind. An army, she knew, was a huge thing, but that it should leave ruin in its wake even without the violence of battle drove home the scale and depth of the errand her sons had been sent on. Follow this back, and the mud and filth would go to Kiaria, and Suddapal before that. Inentai. Nus. Along with his conquests, Geder Palliako had made a road of scars that tracked back, in the end, to Antea. To the fields in the south where the army had assembled, and to which it had never come home.