Her own notes were among the pages Marcus Wester had saved. Her plans and schemes from before he and the players had arrived strapped to Inys’s great legs. Schedules of mercenary companies, of crop prices and iron prices and coal. A long examination written in cipher of what resources could be choked off to limit the ability of Antea—of anyone—to make the instruments of war. Alum and salt and cotton. All of it rigorous and logical and impossible as a dream. The roundships held the remaining wealth of Suddapal that Pyk had been so conservative in lending, the swollen coffers from the wise buying out letters of credit when they fled before the storm. Likely, they had more wealth on board now than all the pirates in the fleet had ever captured. It would be a miracle if they weren’t all slaughtered in their sleep and their bodies thrown over the side for the sharks. Except Master Kit was there to nose out any mutiny, and Marcus would stop them, and if he didn’t Inys might still take offense at what the pirates would have to do to Marcus. Fears laid against fears, making a fragile kind of stability. Not that it mattered.
In among her notes, she found another page, one not written in her hand. She knew the words without looking at them. They’d burned themselves into her eyes.
Cithrin I love you. I love you more than anyone I’ve ever known. All this time that I’ve been running Aster’s kingdom and fighting to protect the empire, it’s been a way to distract myself from you. From your body. Does that sound crass? I don’t mean it to be. Before that night, I’d never touched a woman. Not the way I touched you.
She had had so few professions of love in her life. Sandr had muttered something along the lines, she thought, back when they were drunk and skating and stupid. Even then she’d known better than to believe it. Salan, in his boyish, fumbling way. Qahuar Em, the first lover she’d ham-handedly tried to betray. Had he ever pretended to love her? She didn’t think so. He had respected her too much for that. None of them had been as heartfelt and sincere as Geder, and none of them had made her skin crawl. Even now, Geder’s words felt like she’d brushed her arm against a snake.
If only there were an exchange where people could trade love for love. She could have sold Geder’s devotion to some status-struck girl at the Antean court and gotten the admiration and desire of… oh, an ambassador, perhaps. Some merchant prince who’d put his heart in an awkward position and would have been much better paired with the voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. Only at some point, she would have to have fallen in love with someone as well, and she was fairly certain she never had. Loving her would have been like lending to a king, a weight on her scales that would never be brought to balance. And anyway—
The profound moment appeared silently and with no fanfare. It cleared its throat, almost in apology, and between one breath and the next changed Cithrin forever. She didn’t catch her breath, didn’t shout. There was no feeling of exultation that demanded it. The sick chaos that she called her mind resolved like a choir lost in pandemonium suddenly finding a chord. Though she had not been asleep, she woke.
The hold all around her was as it had been: shadows and light, the acrid smell of cheap lamp oil and salt and tar, the soft paper in her hand that had once been in Geder’s. She tucked the letter away, sighed, went to the ladder, and rose from the darkness into the moonlight.
She went to find the two men she needed. Marcus Wester and Kit.
“There, upon the horizon stand!” Sandr said, gesturing at the rising hills of Borja in the imagination of the sailors and the guards. Cithrin could almost imagine the red-brown earth.
Kit turned to follow Sandr’s finger, his jaw tight. He was the perfect image of Sebbin Caster, the evil queen’s crippled brother and, through poetic justice, the last of his house. “No rising sun e’er burned so bright! Her castle falls, and so makes right.”
The applause began, Cary and Mikel leading it and the wider audience taking it up. Sandr and Kit stood motionless as the first waves of sound passed over them. Their eyes were still on fire and death, and then their false selves fell away, and they smiled and bowed. The sailors hooted and clapped their hands against their thighs. The bank guards, more accustomed to theater, showed a degree less excitement, but their pleasure was unfeigned. Across the water, Inys blew a bright plume of flame out over the waves. The silver of the moonlight and the smoky red of dragonfire seemed like a painter’s contrivance. Cithrin found herself smiling and wondering if it had been only coincidence, or if the dragon had been able to follow the performance even across the wide water. She moved through the little crowd, dodging Chisn Rake when the old Tralgu and a young Dartinae sailor began to pantomime the final duel scene. Marcus and Yardem were on the port side, leaning against the railing. Yardem’s eyes found her first, and his wide, canine smile was a pleasure to see.
Marcus straightened, tugged at his sleeve, and tried to look nonchalant.
“Captain,” Cithrin said. “I wondered if I might have a moment?”
Marcus and Yardem exchanged a glance. Yardem flicked an ear.
“Of course,” Marcus said. Cithrin nodded and walked toward the ship’s bow. He took two long, fast strides to catch up and then walked beside her. The half moon hung low in the sky and stars spilled across the darkness. In the night, she couldn’t make out the coast away to the east. Or maybe they’d pulled farther away from land, tracking toward the Thin Sea, Narinisle, and Stollbourne.
“You’re looking… better,” Marcus said. “Are you feeling well?”
“I am,” Cithrin said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to need to change our plans.”
The moonlight made Wester a drawing of himself in black ink and watered paint. Still, she could see the skepticism in his expression. “I’m listening.”
“We’ve made a mistake. I’ve made it. And I think I see the way to… well, not win. Nothing so straightforward as that. I think I see the way to start fighting the right battles.”
“We lost. Doesn’t mean it was the wrong battle.”
“Battle’s the wrong word. I should have said struggle or… oh, there aren’t words for this. The mistake we made, that we all made, is thinking that we’re fighting Antea. That we’re fighting Geder.”
“All right,” Marcus said, pulling the syllables out. “And who is it we’re actually fighting, then?”
“The idea of war.”
Marcus nodded. The grey at his temples caught the light. His boots scraped against the deck as he shifted, and when he spoke, his voice was calm and careful.
“Grief’s a terrible thing, Cithrin, and everyone comes to it differently. You’ve lost a lot in the last years, and I know how that can affect—”
“I haven’t lost my mind. I’m saner now than I have been in weeks. Listen to me. Listen to my voice.”
“You sound like Kit now.”
“Listen. In Porte Oliva, we thought of it as a normal war. The enemy came, and we prepared for a fight. And we fought. Even though we know that the spiders are there to make us fight, we still fought. This has been going on since the beginning of history. Geder wasn’t there when it started. This isn’t about him or Antea or me. This is Morade wrecking humanity by making us fight.”
“I don’t know about that. We’ve got a pretty consistent record of killing each other without any spiders being involved,” Marcus said, but she couldn’t stop herself to answer his point.
“I thought we would win because we had a better position, better soldiers, better weapons. I thought we’d win it like a battle. Only it’s like we were trying to clean something with filthy water. We can’t win by fighting, because fighting is what the enemy wants of us. What it goads us into.”