“A time will come,” the Kurtadam said, “when a man you love will ask you a question you cannot answer. Your silence will shape your life.”
“Is that supposed to be useful?” Clara asked, her unease making her voice sharper and more haughty than she’d intended.
He shrugged. “I see what I see. Shadows and the shadows of shadows, but for you? Truth. Remember me when it happens. It is why the soldiers come to me. Why they trust me. Whatever you seek vengeance for, I have the power to help you. For the right coin.”
“And that is what I came to ask,” Clara said, rising to her knees and then her feet. They walked back to her tent, her steps unsteady in the darkness. Vincen was at her side, present but unspeaking. She didn’t know whether she wished he would take her arm or if she was pleased that he hadn’t. Something about the cunning man’s pronouncement had left her feeling terribly fragile. A man you love will ask you a question you cannot answer. She could think of far too many ways for that particular piece of prophecy to come true. Perhaps that was the point. She had little faith in oracles, but even if the Kurtadam was a fraud, he would suffice for her needs.
Back at their little camp, Vincen lit the prepared twigs. The flame smoked. She stared into it, letting the brightness blind her to what lay all around them in the night. It made the world seem smaller.
“Another vulnerability,” Vincen said.
“A small one, but yes.”
“Played well, you could undermine people’s faith. Or start to. Set the knights fighting among themselves.”
“That was my thought,” she said, sick with the words. “I don’t know how to do this, Vincen. I don’t know how to defeat my sons and also save them. How do I undermine Geder Palliako’s priests when Vicarian is one of them? How do I stop his army when Jorey commands it? I don’t know if I have the strength to sacrifice my own family to this, and also don’t see how I can bring myself to stop.”
“I’ve been wondering the same,” Vincen said. “Will you tell your man in Carse about the cunning man?”
“Not tonight,” she said. “It’s late, and I’m too tired for writing letters.”
A loud pop came from the fire, followed by a low hiss of sap cooking to nothing. Green wood and trampled grass. She shuddered though she wasn’t cold.
“I want him to win, Vincen. This battle against Porte Oliva and this bel Sarcour girl? I want him to win it, and I am fighting on her side.”
“It’s like that sometimes,” he said.
“Oh,” Clara said, and her chuckle was sharper than she’d have wished. “Have you been on this path before?”
If he heard the sarcasm in her voice, he ignored it. “Something like it, yes. Every hunter feels it sometimes. You chase the hart, you and your dogs and your lord leading the chase. And for a moment, maybe, you catch sight of it. You remember that this magnificent animal is about to die for a bit of meat we don’t need and the honor of a man with nothing better to do, and you wish the hart would run. That he’d find some escape you hadn’t seen, slip the pack, and vanish into the wood.”
His voice had gone soft. She smiled into the little dancing flame, what she felt most was a deep and broadening sorrow. “You sound as though you were thinking of some particular incident.”
“I can think of several,” he said.
“Did you hate my husband?”
“No,” Vincen said without even the pause of a heartbeat. “He was the baron, and he was my lord.”
“If he had only been a man?”
It was Vincen’s turn to chuckle, and he managed to make the sound softer and richer than she had. “Then he wouldn’t have been the baron and my lord.”
“What did you do those times with him when you found your loyalty tilting toward your prey? Did you never call back the dogs? Let the beast slip away?”
“No, I killed it just the same. I’m a huntsman, Clara. We both are.”
Marcus
We should be harassing their column,” Marcus said.
“I don’t see much point,” Cithrin said lightly. “The scouts say they’ll be here in a few days.”
“We should have been harassing their column. From the first foot they put in Birancour, the queen’s army should have been snapping at their heels. Wearing them down.”
Cithrin shrugged in a way that made him want to shake her. Around them, the taproom was busy with its midday custom. Sausages and hot mustard, beer and wine, the twice-baked flatbread that snapped against his lips when he bit it. The preparations for the coming siege had left the outer ring of the city almost empty, and not everyone had fled to the countryside. If anything, more of them had come behind the great white wall. For the first time in generations, siege engines were being hauled back into their niches and new gates fixed in place. Porte Oliva had been a smaller city the last time an army stood outside its defenses, and the press of extra bodies in the street was the measure of it.
“The queen’s throwing you to the dogs,” Marcus said. “Just standing back and letting them march to us like Porte Oliva wasn’t one of her own cities.”
“I know,” Cithrin said, taking a handful of nuts and raisins.
“That’s why we should be doing it.”
“I’ve talked to the governor about it,” she said. “We don’t have the soldiers. There are enough to man the wall and defend the port, but if we start putting together companies to put in the field, we’ll be stretched too thin.”
“Really?” Marcus said. “And how many battles has the governor been through?”
“None.”
“Well I’ve seen a couple, one time and another. We’re not ready for this.”
Cithrin frowned. She’d grown older since the day she’d left for Carse it seemed like years before. Her face was wider now, though her Cinnae blood meant it would always be sharp at the chin and cheeks. Her shoulders were broader now, and when she moved it was less like a girl pretending at womanhood than a woman’s authentic gait. When she wasn’t in the room with him, he thought of her as the girl he remembered, and was a little startled every time he saw her again.
“Inys wants to wait, and I don’t see that we’re in a position to issue orders to a dragon,” she said. Then, changing the subject, “Herez had to close down the bounty system. I think they’re afraid Antea will come after Callon Cane once they’re done with me.”
“You should move him to Sara-sur-Mar and let Geder chase him down the queen’s throat,” Marcus said bitterly, and Cithrin laughed. Marcus scowled, relented, smiled. In the street, a man started shouting and another took it up. A few people in the taproom craned their necks to look out the windows or the half-open door, but Marcus could tell the sound of a traffic brawl from something serious. It was to be expected, this near to the storm.
Since the defeat of the queen’s army in the north and the arrival of Inys, Marcus had seen the city fall into the old patterns. The coming violence touched everything from the mood in the taprooms to the street-corner puppet shows to the songs the workers sang while they carried their masters’ crates inside the protecting ring of the wall. He hadn’t seen Porte Oliva in the months before, but Yardem had told him enough of how the blockade had shaken the city to recognize the mixture of anxiety and relief that had them all drunk. They had been in danger and now they were saved. They had a champion to lead them, and a new danger to overcome. The stones themselves had found faith in the dragon and its power to protect them. Marcus knew it was an illusion because he’d been that savior himself once in an old war in Northcoast.
He’d even had faith in himself, back then.