“Any sign of the locals?” Marcus asked.
“A few,” Kit said.
“Were they angry?”
“Yes.”
“Are they coming back with torches and swords?”
“Probably,” Master Kit said. “I believe they had gone to great lengths to keep the dragon’s existence secret. It seemed to me they were quite… disappointed that we’d woken it.”
“All right.”
“At the very least, I think we cannot expect their help should another storm come.”
“It’s Hallskar in winter. Another storm is going to come.”
“I think you’re right.”
Marcus poked at the blue fire, sending up a shower of orange embers. Nearby, Hornet called out something and Smit answered back. In the hazy white sky, gulls shrieked and wheeled. The air smelled of cold and salt. “I was hoping it would be more a situation where if we woke him, he’d explain how to defeat the spider priests. That was optimistic, wasn’t it?”
“It appears to have been,” Kit said.
“ ‘Well,’ he could have said. ‘It’s simple. They can’t stand garlic.’ That would have been good.”
“I rather like garlic, actually.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” Kit said. “We came and searched because they were searching and we didn’t want them to find whatever it was they were looking for. They didn’t. We woke the beast because we thought the enemy of our enemy might be our friend. It was a risk, and we still don’t know where those choices will lead. It’s possible that the things we’ve done will save the world.”
“It’s possible that Sandr will marry a Haaverkin woman, stay in Hallskar, and make a brood of little tattooed actor babies. I wouldn’t bet a penny on it, though.”
“I suppose I wouldn’t either. But there is hope.”
“Only for the hopeful.”
“Are you utterly without it, then? Hope, I mean?”
Marcus laughed. “You remember who you’re talking with, don’t you? The sum of my hopes right now is not to die on a frozen salt coast anytime in the next three days. That’s tricky enough. Let’s not borrow anything more until after.”
“The dragon may still come back.”
“No,” Marcus said, rising to his feet. “He won’t. Not anytime soon.”
“You sound certain.”
Marcus nodded up at the empty sky. “Can you imagine what it would be like? Waking up to find everything you loved turned to bone and ash, everything that made the world beautiful gone?”
“I take it that you can?”
“Every day the sun rises,” Marcus said. “It takes some getting used to.”
Clara Annalise Kalliam, Formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells
The attic of Lord Skestinin’s manor in Camnipol was white. The boards of the floor and the plaster of the walls, the casement of the little dormer window, the shelves built into the wall and filled with crates and sacks. Everything was white, and it caught the winter afternoon sun and made something bright of it. Not warm to the skin, but to the eye. It made the little nest glow.
The mattress she lay on was white as well, and filled with down. The blankets pulled up to her breasts were soft wool, rich with the scent of cedar to keep away moths and now also of sex. They had been packed away for the winter season when the court was all gone from the city, and unpacked now in secrecy. Vincen Coe, the young huntsman who had once been her servant and then her lover and now both, lay spent. His long hair spread around his head like a rich auburn halo, and his breath was deep and soft. Clara Kalliam shifted, using her arm as a pillow, and considered the young man’s face. The improbably long eyelashes, the soft lips, the dark scattering of whiskers just under the surface of his cheek. He was a beautiful man. Young enough to be her son. A thousand ranks below her socially. Devoted to her in a way no man in her life had ever been, except her husband.
A pigeon fluttered up against the dormer’s glass, cooed in confusion, and flew away again. Clara let her body sink into the mattress, enjoying the warmth and softness and languor of her muscles.
She was not a young woman. Her hair was going white. Her skin not so taut as it had been when she was a girl. Vincen was the second man she’d lain with in her whole life, but she tried not to let her greed of him overwhelm her. A lifetime in the vicious meat-grinder of court politics had taught her that there were a thousand different reasons why people had affairs. To satisfy vanity, or for revenge, or out of sorrow. From political necessity or love of scandal. To create the story of one’s self. Or to retell it differently.
She had never imagined herself as the sort of woman to conduct an illicit liaison. And even now, and despite all evidence, she didn’t. Not really. Vincen was simply Vincen, and the woman she was with him, the woman who had risen from the ashes of her husband’s failure and execution, who had lived in a cheap boarding house and been questioned by the regent’s private inquisitors, was more real than the sugar-and-plaster woman she pretended among the court. But, of course, both were true. Her soul encompassed both of them.
“We should go,” Vincen said. “We’ll be missed.”
“We should,” she agreed.
Neither of them moved to reclaim their clothes, strewn on the white floorboards. Their intimate ritual was not done yet. The words were only the prelude to their parting. She breathed in, savoring the dust-smell of the attic and the chill of the air. Through the window, she could see the great tower of the Kingspire rising above the city. Even with the mattress on the floor, the spire’s uppermost floors were too high to see. Only the red banner with its eightfold sigil, the sign and symbol of the spider goddess’s temple housed in its high halls. The cloth shifted in the wind as if it were not only a religious cult’s marking but the new banner of Imperial Antea. Perhaps it was.
“Are things well?” she asked.
“As well as can be,” Vincen said. “I’m still a new man in an established house. It will be some time before I’m trusted. There was some resentment of Jorey.”
“Of Jorey?” she said, her heart moving instantly to her son’s defense. “Whatever for?”
“He married Lord Skestinin’s daughter just in time to make her the daughter-in-law of a traitor.”
“Oh. Well, yes. That.”
“Now that he’s better known as the regent’s right hand than his father’s son, it’s turning about, though.”
Clara considered the rafters. A spider’s web clung in a corner, empty. In the course of three seasons, she had gone from the Baroness of Osterling Fells to the disgraced wife of a traitor to the mother of the new Lord Marshal. And in among all of those, she’d become a widow and a fallen woman, a traitor to the crown in her own right and a patriot more devout than most of the men who had the running of the empire. The court had left her in the autumn a woman barely rehabilitated, her very name tainted. When they returned, they would find themselves jockeying to be in her good graces. It left her dizzy when she thought about it, like looking up at the stars.
“Things change so quickly,” she said, “and so completely.”
“They don’t, m’lady,” Vincen said, taking her hand. He kissed the knuckle of her thumb. “Only the stories we tell about them do.”
The dreaded moment came when Clara sighed and pulled the blanket aside. Knowing in the mornings that she might hope for these brief hours, she had adjusted her wardrobe to those garments she could put off and on with only minimal assistance from her servants or Vincen. She painted her face only lightly these days. When she’d lived in the boarding house, she had forgone the practice entirely. She descended from their hidden nest first, making her way by the central stair to the third-floor rooms, some of which were her own. Sabiha and Jorey’s marital apartments were on the same floor, near the street. Lower down, the guest rooms and the private quarters of Lord and Lady Skestinin, who very rarely used them. He was more often away with the fleet or at his holdings in Estinport, and she was famously allergic to the politics of the court. And likely wiser and more content because of it.