None of the cunning men seemed disturbed. The Kurtadam shifted himself between Sabiha’s knees and put his hand gently on her sex. She grunted in discomfort, and Geder had to leave or pass out. In the hallway, he pressed his forehead to the cool stone until he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit. Basrahip still hadn’t come. He wanted Basrahip to be there, to advise him. The priest would know what to do if anyone did.
“Lord Regent?”
The older of the two women stood before him. He hadn’t heard her come out. “Yes. I’m here. I’m all right. How is she?”
The older woman’s expression was serene and sorrowful. “We will do what we can, my lord.”
“That’s not enough.”
“These things are always delicate, Lord Palliako,” she went on. “We will do everything we can. But if it comes to a choice between saving the child or the mother, my lord…” She held out her hands, as if offering him something he might not want.
Geder felt the air leave his lungs. “You want me to decide that?”
“If we knew what your preferences were, my lord, it would help to guide us.”
Geder took a long, deep breath. They wanted him to choose whether Sabiha or her baby mattered more? They wanted him to give them permission to let one of them die? The fear and horror twisted in him, turning to rage in less than the blink of an eye.
“Guide you?” he said. “Here’s my guidance. That is my friend in there, and her baby with her. When they come out, it will be the same. Mother and child both. Both. If there is anything else, I will whip you all to death myself! Do you understand?”
The woman stepped back. The calm of her expression was like a mask. “My lord, I do,” she said.
Cithrin
Maestro Asanpur pushed his broom, his gaze cast down. The shards and splinters of glass scraped against the café’s floor with each pass of the bristles. His blind eye was watering, but not so much as to call it weeping. The breeze that passed through the shattered windows would have been pleasant in other circumstances. Cithrin shifted from one foot to the other and then stepped forward, careful not to tread where the old Cinnae was cleaning. She picked up the stones from where they’d landed. They were dark and rough and fit easily in her palm. They’d been chosen for throwing. The bricks of the floor bore small white scars where they’d struck.
Maestro Asanpur poured the shattered glass into a tin bucket and held it out to Cithrin. She put the stones in carefully, like she was nestling black eggs into a nest of shards. She wasn’t afraid that he would drop the bucket if she’d simply dropped them, but she wanted to do something gentle as if it would bring something gentle back to her. The impulse was much like prayer.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and the old man shook his head.
“No reason, Magistra. Youth will have its day. Boys have been breaking windows as long as there have been windows.”
Not because of me, Cithrin thought. But so long as he was pretending that the violence was random, it seemed rude to insist on the truth.
With every day that the blockade continued, Porte Oliva seemed to grow darker and more surly. Twice now, she’d woken in the night to the sound of voices in the street outside the counting house. Someone had smeared shit on the front door, leaving a swath of dirty brown and a wide, masculine handprint. After that, Yardem had redone the guard rotation. Now they kept someone in the street night and day, and half a dozen in the counting house itself. He’d also put sword-and-bows outside the apartments that Komme, Pyk, and Isadau kept. He’d hired on more guards to fill the gaps, and for once Pyk hadn’t objected.
Maestro Asanpur stopped his cleaning to prepare her a cup of coffee. Cithrin went to her back room and opened the little strongbox she kept there. The books hadn’t been touched, but next time they might be. Or the café might be burned. She sat at the little table, running her palm over the smooth-lacquered wood, and considered where she could move her work. By being here, she was putting Asanpur and his café at risk. Maybe she should move to the taproom nearest her rooms. God knew she was spending more time drinking than doing the work of the bank anyway.
The emptiness of the ledgers showed the same truths as the broken glass. To the merchants and traders, a bank was a place to go to reduce risks. When the bank itself became the locus of uncertainty, it was like pouring poison in the water. Even the payments due on the loans Pyk had approved were coming in slow. There were stories and explanations for each of them—a child with the flux, a robbery, a delivery of wheat that hadn’t come in. They didn’t matter. The larger picture was unmistakable. Whether they admitted it to themselves or not, they were all waiting for the queensmen’s blades to arrive and shut down the bank.
And in truth, Cithrin was waiting for it too. In the meantime, at least the coffee was good.
When she first heard the sound of voices raised, she realized she had been hearing it for some time. It wasn’t the sound of the Grand Market. That combination of shouts and laughter and complaint was as familiar to her as breath. This was something else. A slow roar that built, voice upon voice, in a chorus like the surf against stones. Cithrin’s belly went tight. She put her cup on the table with a thump that slopped coffee and milk onto the boards and stippled the ledger. She didn’t stop to blot it clean. Heart in her throat, she stepped into the café’s main room, ready to meet her doom if it waited for her there.
Maestro Asanpur stood in the doorway, shifting from side to side as if he were angling for a better view. Outside, people were running. The Grand Market had emptied. The queensmen who guarded it had left their posts. Cithrin came closer and put her hand on the old man’s thin shoulder, torn between relief and alarm.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I can’t say, Magistra,” the old Cinnae said. “They’re all shouting, but I can’t tell what they’re saying.”
“They’re going toward the salt quarter,” she said, her mind dancing across the possibilities. The blockaders were attacking, and the citizens running to battle. Geder had sent an army after all, and they were fleeing it. There was fire, perhaps, or a plague.
Yardem appeared on the far side of the square in his heavy armor. Four other guards were at his side; two Firstblood men, a bronze-scaled Jasusu woman who was new to the company, and Halvill the Timzinae. Cithrin stepped out to meet them, her chin high. The stream of people had thinned by the time they reached her.
“Pyk sent us, ma’am,” Yardem said. “I think you’ll want to see this.”
The crowd on the seawall was so dense, Cithrin was certain people would be crushed. Adolescent boys and girls were climbing up to stand or sit on the raised areas above the clifflike drop to the rocks below. Ancient ballistas had been installed in the gaps since the start of the blockade, though no enemy had ever come near enough to draw their fire. Merchants and carters and street puppeteers pressed themselves in the gaps between the engines of war and the pale stone, staring out to sea. Cithrin’s jaw ached and her belly felt like she was going to be sick. Yardem sighed, squared his shoulders, and leaned close to her, speaking loud to be heard over the voices of the crowd.
“Put your hand in my belt, and stay close.”
“Where are we going?”
“The front,” he said with a wide, canine grin. He turned and Cithrin looped her fingers around the wide, dark leather of his belt, pulling herself close to his back so that no one could force their way between them. Yardem shouted for the people to make way, then waded into the crowd. Halvill and the Jasuru women took positions at Cithrin’s side, their faces fixed in expressions of boredom tempered by the threat of violence. People shouted at them, jostled shoulders against them, pushed. Step by slow step, they made their way through the pack. Even under the open sky with a breeze coming off the water, the air was heavy and close with their bodies and their breath.