The strangeness of it struck her. All the despair and fear in her letter was truth. When her mind turned to the war, and the spider goddess, the fate of her house and her kingdom, the world looked bleak and empty of redemption. But flirting with Vincen when no one was there to see or riding through the high, green grass with her son at her side and the sun in her eyes was still pleasant. Even a burning world had its moments of peace and sweetness. Perhaps even more, since they were so rare and the alternative so bitter.
The advance guard pushed on, flattening the grass as they passed so that ambush from the sides became less likely. Clara found herself imagining the track they left as the belly marks of a great dragon scratching itself on the ground. The crushed blades were prettier that way, even if it wasn’t truth.
“Mother,” Jorey said, intruding on her private, meaningless thoughts, “I have a favor to ask. When you turn aside, I’ll be sending a courier with you. Reports for Geder.”
“Will you?” she said. That was interesting. Perhaps there would be a chance to see them on the road. Copy them. Change them, even, if there were some advantage to be had.
“I also have a letter… for Sabiha. I was going to put it with the others, but if you carry it, I know it won’t be delivered to the wrong place by mistake.”
“Ah, one of those letters. I understand. I have a collection of them your father wrote to me, once upon a time.”
“Mother!”
“Jorey, dear, one thing that you must be aware of by pure force of logic if nothing else? You were not the first generation to discover sex.”
“I’m not having this conversation,” Jorey said, but there was laughter in his voice. Real laughter, not its bitter twin. “And thank you for agreeing to carry it. And not read it yourself.”
They rode on for a time. The land was surprisingly flat, and the wind made waves in the grass like it was water and their horses were sailboats. It was lovely. That it could not last made it more so.
Cithrin
Five days after Barriath Kalliam’s departure for Sara-sur-Mar in his new and unlikely role, a great pod of the Drowned appeared. They stayed with the fleet as the ships floated north, passing the rough, cruel coast that separated Herez and Princip C’Annaldé. The pale bodies floated beneath the ship where Inys lay. Sometimes they crowded so thickly there seemed more flesh than ocean. Occasionally, the dragon reached over and sank his vast head beneath the waves, and the drag set the sailors crawling over and around him, to keep the ship’s course true. A few hours later, the Drowned would swarm and lift up the shining corpse of some great beast—grey-skinned squid half as long as the ship or silver-scaled tuna or ink-black flesh in a form no sailor had ever seen—from the depths like tribute being offered to a king.
Some days Marcus would take a ship’s boat over and try to talk to the dragon, but more often he wouldn’t. Cithrin would watch when it occurred to her that she might, but she made no point of it. Her world had changed, not to a nightmare. Nothing so bright and passionate as terror lived in her. Disappointment, yes. Despair, certainly. More than anything else, Cithrin was profoundly aware of distance. In her cabin, she would hang in her hammock, wearing the same clothes she had for a week, thick sweat making her skin sticky. Her belly was too tight for food, but she forced down bowls of salted fish as hard as leather. Her gut rebelled every time, and she kept it down through force of will. It was easy to do, because her body with its struggles and the suffering was so far away. She saw all the symptoms of her illness, but couldn’t bring herself so far as alarm. If she wasted and died, she did. If not, then the world would go on taking its cuts at her until she did. Everyone died eventually. Except the dragons and the spiders and their hatred. Those, it seemed, would live forever.
Cithrin didn’t sleep, though she sometimes lost consciousness. No dreams bothered her, and she was not refreshed by it. Instead, she experienced it as a stuttering of time. It was day, and then night. The sun was low in the east, playing above the coast, and then it was overhead. She felt as through her mind had developed a bad limp, one that was growing slowly worse. She drank what there was to drink, not because it helped, but because she did. She waited without knowing what she was waiting for. Her body shuddered sometimes, trembling without cause. Occasionally, late at night, she wept and put no particular importance on it. It was simply a thing that happened.
It was an oddly peaceful sort of violence. The worst of it was when someone tried to help her.
“You should come out to the light,” Isadau said.
The cabin was small. There was hardly enough room to stand straight, and the walls—if the slats and beams could deserve the name—were close enough to touch both sides without stretching. Someone outside the room coughed and muttered a florid obscenity. Cithrin could hear everything around her perfectly. She assumed they could hear her too. She wished Isadau wouldn’t talk, but not so much that she’d object.
“I’ve seen sunlight,” Cithrin said. “Has it changed?”
“It’s not healthy to stay too long in darkness.”
The magistra of Suddapal hunched against the wall, the black scales of her skin seeming to blend in with the shadows. She was beautiful, and Cithrin wished there was something to do for her. She would have liked to be kind to her. Isadau smiled tentatively.
“There’s nothing out there,” Cithrin said.
“There is a great deal,” Isadau said, and her hand found its way into Cithrin’s. “We have lost a battle, but it is not the last. Even with his priests, Geder cannot press his campaign forever.”
“He can, though,” Cithrin said. “Because we can’t fight him. It all keeps happening, again and again and again. Nothing will be different in Stollbourne. They’ll use their fear of him to demand our gold, just the way the prince of Vanai did. And the queen of Birancour. And we’ll be in the same position we had in Porte Oliva, trying to balance being too useful against not being useful enough. It hasn’t worked. It’s never worked. It won’t.”
“We can send your plans and schemes to Komme,” Isadau said. “The branch in Porte Oliva didn’t have the coin to make them work, but—”
“What will be cheaper for him?” Cithrin said, gently, softly. She felt she was breaking hard news to a dear friend. “Bankrupting his bank to fight a war he wants no part of, or handing me to Geder?”
“You know Captain Wester and Yardem will never let that happen,” Isadau said. “You know I won’t either. You are loved, Cithrin.”
Her throat felt thick, and for a moment, she mistook sorrow for mere nausea. They sat in the dark, weeping quietly together while two sailors on the other side of the thin wall argued about oiled ropes and iron nails. When at length Cithrin spoke, her voice was low and rough as a child at the trailing end of a tantrum.
“I was so sure we’d win.”
The books and ledgers were in the hold, and Cithrin went there sometimes. She looked through the accounts for three dead branches—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—not because there was anything to learn there. It was like sitting with old friends and recalling sweeter times. The oldest entries were in Magister Imaniel’s handwriting, the newest in Pyk Usterhall’s. The dead before and the dead behind. Their voices mixed in her half-hinged memory. It’s bank policy never to lend to people who consider it beneath their dignity to repay became When we’ve won, we have less risk and more money. She thought of Besel and of Smit. She still wore the necklace poor lovestruck little Salan had given her before going off to man the walls at Kiaria. A silver bird to care for until the war was over. Only they hadn’t known then how terribly, terribly long ago the war had begun.