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“Geder?” Jorey said, stepping toward the man. “Are you ill? You look…”

“I know. I look like hell,” Geder said, then nodded to Clara. “Lady Kalliam. I’m sorry.”

You murdered my husband with a dull blade and apologize to me for looking unwell, she thought. “Lord Regent,” she said.

“I thought you were in Suddapal. With…” Jorey glanced at her, embarrassment showing for a moment in his eyes. “With your banker… woman… friend.”

“Cithrin betrayed me,” Geder said, his lips shuddering with the words. Bright tears spilled down his cheeks. “I told her that I loved her, just the way you said, and that I wanted her. And I told Fallon Broot that she and her bank shouldn’t be interfered with and she…” Geder sobbed, staring at Jorey like a child with a favorite toy that had broken in his hands. “She worked with the Timzinae. And when I went to her, she left. She was gone when I came. I loved her, Jorey. I’ve never loved anybody.”

Clara nodded to Geder and then to Jorey, and stepped slowly backward out of the room, drawing the door almost closed behind her. Almost, but not quite. She stood in the corridor, her head bowed, and listened as the most powerful man in the world, hero and regent and unquestioned leader of the empire, poured out confessions of heartbreak between sobs. Clara knew the name Cithrin. There had been a part-Cinnae girl, pale as a sprout and as fragile, who’d come to Camnipol in some previous age, when Dawson still lived. Clara recalled the girl offering condolences after Dawson’s execution like it had been some particularly vivid dream. Cithrin bel Sarcour, assistant or some such to Paerin Clark of the Medean bank.

The same Paerin Clark to whom she had been sending her letters. She turned away, walking down the corridor on cat-soft feet. A thousand questions buzzed in her mind. What did the bank know? What did it suspect? What was its agenda in undermining Geder’s plans to enslave the Timzinae? Some answers she could glean from listening to her boys talk in the morning. Others she might have to take her best guess and be satisfied. When she regained her own rooms, she sent the servant girl away and lay on her bed, her arms spread wide, and laughed silently. It wasn’t mirth that shook her, but relief and fear.

The sun fell, turning her windows to red and then grey and then black. She lit her little bedside lamp herself and called for a servant to set a fire in the grate. She had her supper brought to her—beet soup and a thin shank of chicken. Hardly the sumptuous repast she was used to seeing in the houses of the powerful, but a thousand times better than what she would have had in the boarding house. And times, after all, were hard. Afterward, she lit her pipe and waited, her mind moving in silence.

Vincen came near midnight, his soft cough outside her door as deliberate as an announcement. She let him in and closed the door behind him. The warmth of sexuality and love was gone from his expression. And from hers.

“Well,” she said. “I think we have the scandal of the season, and the court not even returned from the King’s Hunt.”

“Does he know, then? Does the Lord Regent suspect you?”

Clara drew fresh smoke into her lungs, frowning. “I’m not in prison or dead, so I doubt it. And why should he?”

“This can’t be good, m’lady.”

“It may not be. Or it may be excellent. Until now Geder has stepped from success to success. Even his failures have been recast as master strategy after the fact. This is a humiliation, and what’s more, a romantic one. If there’s anything Geder understands less than war, it’s love. It isn’t a picture that can be made lovely by a different frame.”

“He won’t lose power over it. If anything, people will see him with greater sympathy.”

“Worse than sympathy. Pity. The hero of Antea will be remade as a victim. And I will wager you anything you like that Geder will take comfort in it. He is entirely too ready to point out the ways in which he’s been wronged, when what he ought to do is make light of it.”

“So this… is a good thing?”

“You’re the one that said it. It isn’t we who change, but the stories about us. This will make him less a creature of awe. Less the great man from legend. It may remind the noble houses that Geder and his priests are capable of losing, and if it does, that will be a very fine thing indeed,” Clara said. Her tobacco was spent, and she leaned forward, tapping the ashes out into the fire. “I feel sorry for the girl, though. She’s done us a favor, and for payment, she’s about to become the most hated woman in the world.”

Cithrin bel Sarcour, Voice of the Medean Bank in Porte Oliva

The sea had never been home for Cithrin bel Sarcour. Her life had been grown around the Medean bank as a vine around a trellis, and so the great waters of the world had been one part roadway that linked all ports and one part supplier of fish and salt and oil. Vaster than the lands on her maps, the sea had been defined by where it connected and what could be taken from it. That it was also a place had never entered her mind before now.

The winter days spent on the Inner Sea were brief, bright, and cold. The nights were black. Ice coated the decks and frost formed on the rigging by moonlight, melting only reluctantly with the coming of dawn. The shore was a darkness on the northern horizon, and Cithrin looked at it from the rails wishing she might never touch land again. Behind her little ship was the wreckage of the five cities of occupied Suddapal. Before her, Porte Oliva. One, a city that had fallen to the murderous ambitions of Antea. The other, her home. And somewhere beyond the black line to the north was Geder Palliako, regent of Antea and leader of the spider priests, whom—for the best of reasons—she had embarrassed and betrayed. Every hour brought her closer to the docks of Porte Oliva and the necessity of facing the consequences of her choice. She would rather have stayed at sea.

Instead, she spent her days walking the decks and her nights in her tiny cabin, a plank across her thighs, writing and rewriting her report to the bank. She had left Suddapal with no warning, and was traveling so quickly that no courier would outpace her. The news of her decision to abandon the city and their efforts there would arrive with her. The ledgers and books in the chest under her hammock would tell the whole tale, but her report was her chance to interpret it, to shape for the others what she had been thinking and why she had done what she’d done. Every night she tried, and every morning scraped the ink from the parchment and began again until the morning came with no more nights behind it.

Yardem Hane, the head of her guard company now that Marcus Wester was gone, stood on the deck at her side. His great ears were cocked forward, as if he were listening to the waves. She pulled her black wool cloak tight around her shoulders and let the wind bite at her face. The smoke from Porte Oliva’s chimneys rose in the north, white against the winter blue.

“Well,” she said, “this will be interesting.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Yardem said, his voice low and rolling as a landslide. “Afraid it will.”

The call of seagulls grew slowly louder as the captain angled the ship in toward shore. “I did what needed to be done.”

“Did.”

“You’d think that would be comforting.”

He turned his wide, canine head to her. “Regrets, ma’am?”

“Ask me again when I’ve made my report.”

The seawall of Porte Oliva rose up high above the surf. As the guide boat led them in through the maze of reefs that made up the bay, Cithrin considered the stone. At the top, narrow openings showed where engines of war could be placed should the city come under siege. She had walked by them a thousand times, and only seen them as a curiosity of the architecture. The world had changed.