Cithrin closed her eyes in pleasure that was only half feigned. “It’s good to be home.”
The old man beamed with pleasure and went back to his kitchens. Cithrin sat quietly, waiting for her body to stop telling her that the ground beneath her was shifting with the waves. The moment only felt like peace, but the illusion was all she had, and so she cultivated it.
She had almost a full, pleasant hour before Pyk lumbered through the door. Cithrin had never asked how she had lost the great tusks that rose from most Yemmu’s lower jaws, but without them, Pyk might almost have passed for a thick, brutish Firstblood. She strode up to Cithrin’s side, her eyebrow hoisted.
“Magistra,” Pyk said, making the word a mild insult. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet me here.”
She meant, of course, that Cithrin should have come to the counting house and delivered the report herself rather than sending it with Enen. Cithrin smiled.
“Where better?” she asked.
“Shall we?” Pyk asked, gesturing toward the door of the private room. Cithrin’s belly went tight. This was the moment she had dreaded. One of them, at least. There would be others, and soon. She rose, her coffee warm in her hand. When she’d sat at the table, Pyk closed the door behind them.
“Well,” the Yemmu woman said. “You’ve got balls. Not the sense that God gave a housefly, but balls.”
Cithrin permitted herself a thin smile. It was a mistake.
“If I were you,” Pyk went on, lowering herself onto the bench, “I would have changed my name, headed out to Far Syramys, and never been heard from again. A favor to the rest of us, if nothing else.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Before I send off my recommendations, I want to make sure I’ve understood this. After Isadau left Suddapal, you used your old love affair with the regent of Antea as cover to build an illegal network that helped Timzinae refugees escape the city.”
“No,” Cithrin said. “I started before Isadau left.”
“Thank you for clarifying that. And then when Palliako—who is, by the way, the most powerful man in the fucking world—started writing you love notes and offering to see you, you left him flat and came back to roost in my city.”
“I’d intended to stay,” Cithrin said. “I meant to carry on the masquerade as long as I could.”
“So why didn’t you?”
Cithrin was quiet for a moment, then nodded to herself.
“I did. I stayed as long as I could. And then, when I couldn’t, I left.”
“Well, at least you’ve got standards.”
“The bank supported everything we were doing there,” Cithrin said. “Isadau first and then me. Komme knew about the refugees’ network. He created Callon Cane and the bounty system, or allowed it to be created. I stayed there because if I hadn’t, Isadau would have stayed, and she would have been killed, and she wasn’t. I saved hundreds of people from the Antean prisons, and most of them were children. Say what you like about me, we won.”
Pyk folded her fingers together on the table. Her expression was worse than angry. It was patient.
“We’re a bank. When we’ve won, we have less risk and more money. You’ve brought less money and more risk. You made the classic error. You saw something you wanted, and you bought it. For you it was Timzinae lives. For someone else it could have been fancy jewelry. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same mistake.”
“It isn’t,” Cithrin said.
“It is,” Pyk said, and her tone allowed no room for dissent. “Our job is to get power. Gather it up. Protect it. Not piss it away so that we can claim the moral high ground.”
“We disagree about that,” Cithrin said, but in truth she wasn’t certain that they did. She could imagine her first teacher, Magister Imaniel, saying all the same words that Pyk did, and they held the weight of truth.
“Komme and Isadau and Paerin and I,” Pyk said. “All of us were careful. We invented this Callon Cane for the bounties. We hid the payments so that no one would track them back to us. We saw to it that the contracts with the ships never listed our extra passengers. And you? You rubbed the Lord Regent’s nose in shit and signed it with the company chop. You declared war on Antea in my name and in Komme’s. And Paerin’s and Chana’s and Lauro’s. If Isadau had stayed, she’d have been killed when they found her out, but we could have claimed she was acting on her own. But you? You brought it here. You brought it to me. The latest of my Cithrin bel Sarcour messes to mop up after.”
She snorted with a grandiose disgust. Cithrin’s jaw tightened and her heart raced like she was being attacked. She forced herself not to move, afraid any motion might end with her fleeing the room.
“The conditions are the same as before,” Pyk went on. “You’re the voice of the bank in name, but you’ve got no power. Even if you hadn’t lit us all on fire, you’d still be my apprentice for a full year, so that’s how it is. You agree to nothing unless I say to. You sign nothing at all, ever. Wear your fancy dresses, go to all the best dinners, be pretty for the governor, but try to take one bit of real power from me, and I’ll put you in a hole. I’ll forward your report and my recommendations to Carse, and we’ll see what Komme wants done with you.”
“What will your recommendation be?”
“That we wrap you in chains and festive paper and ship you to Camnipol with a letter of apology,” Pyk said. “But that’s his to decide, not mine.”
She had known. Some part of her had known the moment she lost sight of Suddapal that it could be no different than this. It didn’t pull the sting, or if it did, not enough.
“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said softly. “I did what I had do.”
“You did not,” Pyk said. “You didn’t have to. God didn’t come up from the earth and demand it. No one held a sword to you. So don’t tell me you had to.”
Cithrin looked into the coffee, the brown swirl at the bottom. The cup had tiny pores all along the inside, and the drink clung to the texture like a man’s cheek a day after he’d shaved. She thought for a moment of Marcus Wester.
“You’re right,” she said. “I didn’t have to. This was what I chose.”
“And?”
Cithrin looked up. “And I’m not sorry.”
Geder Palliako, Lord Regent of Antea
I’m sorry, Cithrin said.
In Geder’s imagination, she knelt before him, chains around her wrists and an iron collar at her neck. Only no, because then she’d just be saying it because she was captive. Her hands were free, then. Her neck smooth and white. Dressed in pale silks. She would have been beautiful in pale silks. She looked up at him, tears in her ice-blue eyes.
I’m sorry to have hurt you. You were only ever a good man to me, and I betrayed you. I have made terrible mistakes in my life, and this was the worst thing I have ever done.
“Why?” Geder asked the empty room. His private chambers low in the Kingspire were warm compared to the bitter spring cold, but there was still a bit of chill. The oak logs burning in the grate and the orange-white coals in the brazier filled the air with the scents of heat and smoke. They weren’t quite enough to keep him from needing blankets. The private guard was stationed outside the rooms so that he could be alone with his thoughts. With his sorrow. “Why did you do that to me?”
Cithrin turned her head away. A tear streaked down her cheek. They misled me. The Timzinae. I fought it, I told them that I knew you, that you were a good, honorable man. That I loved you, but they made me follow their schemes. I would have stayed for you if I could. I would have warned you if I could. I am so sorry, Geder.
He shifted on his pillow, cracking his eyes for a glimpse of the real world. The light in the window was brighter now, but still had the paleness of dawn. He closed his eyes again. With his real hands stuffed unmoving in the warm pocket underneath his pillow, he imagined reaching down to her. Caressing her cheek. She looked back up at him, leaning forward. He caught a glimpse of her small, perfect breasts, and even in the privacy of his own mind, he looked away. To imagine her body was too much. Too close. The wound was too raw there, even for pretending. But his imagination had shifted toward that, and now she had her hand on his knee. His thigh.