Once they reached the docks, she paid the captain his fees and greeted the harbormaster’s assistant. The docking taxes were a simple formality, quickly assessed and quickly paid. Yardem and Enen saw to the unloading of the cargo: crates and chests, and the last few Timzinae citizens whom Cithrin had been able to bring with her. Most were children, some barely old enough to walk, sent to a city where they might know no one rather than remain in their homes and be used to force the compliance of their parents. Those who had no one to meet, Yardem rounded up, instructing them to hold each other’s hands, to watch for each other, and be sure no one was lost. The sight left Cithrin on the edge of tears.
“To the counting house, Magistra?” Enen asked.
“Not yet,” Cithrin said. “You go ahead of me. I think I’ll spend a moment with the city first.”
“Would you like me to deliver your report to Pyk?”
“Yes, if you’d be so kind,” Cithrin said. “It’s in the chest with the books and ledgers there. If Magistra Isadau is there…”
Enen smiled, compassion softening her grey-pelted face. Odd to think there was a time Cithrin had found the Kurtadam woman’s expressions difficult to read.
“I’ll tell her you’re looking forward to seeing her, ma’am,” the old guard said, nodding her head.
Cithrin had come to Porte Oliva as a refugee too young to own property or sign contracts. She had relied for her survival on the protection of men of violence like Yardem Hane and Marcus Wester, the counsel of professional deceivers like Master Kit and Cary and poor, dead Opal, and the training she had in matters of finance that taken the place of love in her childhood. Then, she had needed training to know how to walk as woman walked, and not a girl. Since, she had seen a slaughtered priest hung before his church, had lived in hiding while an insurrection wracked the city around her, had prepared to debase herself in the name of saving others and found that she could not. She no longer needed to remind herself to hold her weight low in her hips or to pull her shoulders back. She walked through the familiar streets of Porte Oliva as if she were older than her years because it was true now. She had become the woman she’d only pretended to be, and the weight of it was more than she’d anticipated.
Porte Oliva had always been a place where the thirteen races of humanity mixed. Otter-pelted Kurtadam with the ornamental beads worked into their fur. Thin, pale Cinnae moving through the streets like ghosts. Bronze-scaled Jasuru, thick-featured Firstblood. There were even a handful of Tralgu and Yemmu, though Cithrin had rarely seen them apart from Yardem and Pyk Usterhall. And the Drowned swam in lazy pods through the water of the bay. She had spent so much time and effort sneaking Timzinae away from Suddapal that she’d expected to see the mixture on the streets of Porte Oliva changed. It was not. There were some Timzinae as there always had been, but she could not say it was more, and after almost a year in Elassae, they seemed too few.
At the southern edge of the Grand Market, she stopped for a while, bought a cup of honeyed almonds from a street cart, and watched one of the puppet shows that made up the civic dialogue. It was a retelling of the classic story of the rise of Orcus the Demon King, with the plot and dialogue changed. The Orcus puppet was in the shape of a Firstblood man in a flowing black cloak, and when the puppeteer spoke his words, they had the accent of Imperial Antea. Geder Palliako’s reputation had spread even to here, then, and Cithrin was not the only one who looked on his victories with dread. The war that the wise had said would never spread so far or last so long had swamped her. The soldiers and the priests had not come here—not yet—but the fear of them had. She wasn’t sure if that left her saddened or pleased. Either way, it was good that they knew.
She left before the end of the show, dropping a silver coin in the box at the puppeteer’s feet, and passed through the Grand Market. The riot of stalls and sellers shouting each other down washed around her, and she felt herself relax a degree for the first time since she’d stepped off the ship. At one stall, a man was selling expensive dresses with the weeping colors of Hallskari salt dye, and she smiled at them.
Banking and commerce were a dance of information and deception, lies and facts and all the power that gold could provide, and she knew it better than she knew herself. She had seen it in the houses of Suddapal, the courts of Camnipol, the theater cart of Master Kit’s traveling company. The Grand Market of Porte Oliva was the expression of it that was most her own. If she chose, she could see it as an innocent might. Men and women jostling one another, merchants in their stalls calling or haggling or adjusting their wares. The queensmen in green and gold strolling through the chaos with bored expressions. Cithrin could see all of that, but she could also see more. The way the price of a bottle of wine in one stall rose when the competitor across the market was too busy to call out a lower one. The way that a bag of coffee was priced ridiculously high so that the bag beside it could be merely exorbitant and still seem a bargain. She could track cutpurses and unlicensed fortune tellers moving in response to the queensmen, finding the balance between turning a profit and ending in a cage outside the Governor’s Palace, measuring their chances in feet from the law, in the degrees by which their faces and shoulders were turned away. Cithrin could look at the placement of the stalls, drawn by random lot at the beginning of each day, and see who had bribed the queensmen who controlled the lottery box. The state of the city was written in the chaos like an expression on a well-known face.
She stepped out the main entrance to the market and into the square beyond it feeling calmer. But only a little bit. The distraction was pleasant, but it did nothing to change the facts of her situation. That accounting would come soon enough. She nodded to the head of the guard as she passed, and he nodded back.
“Good to see you again, Magistra,” he said. “Didn’t know you’d come back.”
“I’ve only just arrived,” she said.
“City’s not been the same without you.”
“Flatterer,” Cithrin said and walked on.
So far as anyone knew, she was and had always been the authorized voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. That she had been underaged when she founded the bank, that the documents of foundation were forgeries, that her notary, the de-tusked Yemmu woman called Pyk Usterhall, was the true authorized power of the branch were all secrets. Another example of the banker’s trade of seeming one thing and being another.
She pushed through the front doors of the café and shrugged off her cloak. The smell of the fresh coffee and cinnamon, bread and black vinegar were like coming home.
“Magistra!” the ancient Cinnae man said, his straw-thin, straw-pale fingers splayed in the air, his grin warm.
“Maestro Asanpur,” she said, accepting his embrace. “I’m so glad to see you again.”
“Come, sit. I will bring you your usual, eh?”
The café had been her idea. Maestro Asanpur was a Cinnae, as her own mother had been. The ancient man with the one milky eye and the touch for coffee that bordered on a cunning man’s art had been happy enough to rent her the use of a back room. The café had become her unofficial office. The center of a bank that held its business in the centers of power all across the world. Or that had, when the world had been a better place. Before Vanai burned. Before Suddapal fell. Maestro Ansanpur put the bone-colored cup in front of her. The coffee was sweeter than it had been in Suddapal, more gentle. Softened with milk and left simple compared with the complex spices the Timzinae used in the country that had been their home. Sipping it was like being two different people—the woman who during her months of exile had longed for the familiar comforts, and also the traveler to whom this particular comfort was no longer familiar. Asanpur stood at her side, his hands fluttering restlessly at his hip, his face open and bright, waiting for her approval.