Marcus cleared his throat. Cithrin restrained herself from taking his hand. It was all so clear in her mind, but this was the first time she’d tried to say it. She had to find a way to make him understand. Or if not that, at least accept. From the far side of the ship, a rough chorus began a song about a Yemmu tin miner who fell in love with his mule. She could hear Cary’s voice in among the others, and Enen’s. Something splashed in the water beside the ship. A porpoise or one of the Drowned. Cithrin held her breath.
Marcus sighed. “I don’t see that letting them slaughter us is much of a strategy. Dying with the moral high ground isn’t as comforting as you might expect.”
“I have no intention of dying,” Cithrin said. “I think there is another way. But it means making some changes.”
“Changes like what?”
“The first is, we’re going to the wrong place. The ships need to go to Northcoast, and you and Kit and I need to go ahead of them.”
“To see Komme,” Marcus said. “Meet with the holding company.”
“No,” Cithrin said. “You can get me a private audience with King Tracian. You put his mother on the throne. He owes his crown to you. His life, even.”
“That doesn’t mean he thinks well of me.”
“He doesn’t need to. We just need to have him in the same room with us.”
“And Kit.”
“And Kit.”
“Because we’re going to use the spiders to convince King Tracian of something.”
“Yes.”
“Something that we don’t want to mention to Komme Medean until it’s already done.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know that I like this plan. My history with Northcoast includes the corpses of a lot of women I love. I’m not interested in seeing you be one of them. What exactly is your business with Tracian?”
“I want to buy something from him.”
“Something?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try me.”
Cithrin scratched her arm. “You know that the policy of the bank is never to give gold to kings, because they never repay the loan?”
“That may be the only part of your trade that makes sense to me,” Marcus said.
“Yes, actually, that’s a mistake. It’s a bad policy, and I’m going to break it. I’m going to buy a permanent debt of the crown to the bank and an agreement from the king for modified letters of credit to make it circulable. Then when other kingdoms want the bank’s holdings, we have a precedent, and the Medean bank is in the center of all those agreements. With royal edicts to back us and existing business partners whom we can run at an advantage, we can build enough transferable letters to let us do… well, almost anything, really.”
“I see.”
“You do?”
“I see that it’s complicated. And you think there’s a way to… God, I can’t believe I’m saying this. You think there’s a way to defeat the idea of war with this whatever the hell it is you’re talking about?”
“I think this is my natural weapon,” Cithrin said. “And it’s one the enemy isn’t ready for. I know I’m asking for your faith on this.”
“And you’re sure we don’t want to talk with Komme before we start?”
“If it doesn’t work, it will be the death of his bank. This isn’t something he’d want done.”
“Never stopped us before,” Marcus said. “Wait here. I’ll go find Kit.”
Geder
Geder’s father wheezed out his laughter, tapping the tabletop with the heel of his palm. His hair was whiter than Geder remembered it, and there were lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes that Geder didn’t remember having seen. Perhaps he had, though. Perhaps his father’s age was something that struck him anew every time they saw each other, and Geder only forgot.
“And so,” Lehrer Palliako said, catching his breath and wiping a tear from his eye, “and so there he was. In the… in the kitchen, with his eyes wide as hands, yes? And saying, All this is for me?”
Cyr Emming wheezed along, breathing through his grin. But he kept glancing at Geder, checking to be sure the Lord Regent hadn’t taken offense. All around them, the Fraternity of the Great Bear murmured, shutters opened to the soft night air. The breeze smelled of ripe fruits and roasting pork, the preparations for some celebration or feast that Geder would no doubt be obligated to attend.
“And then,” Lehrer said, fighting to catch his breath. “And then when the next morning came? The next morning? His nurse came and found me. Told me he was ill.”
“No. He hadn’t,” Emming said and turned to Geder. “You hadn’t.”
Geder spread his hands in mock sorrow.
“Three and a half pies, he’d eaten,” Lehrer said. “Three and a half. Two meat, one blackberry, and half a treacle and walnut. He was on his bed with a hand to his gut and a belly out to here!”
“If someone had told me that they were for everyone at the feast, I wouldn’t have done it,” Geder said. “That’s what he always leaves out of this story. I asked if they were all for me, and nobody said no. I thought they were.”
“You were young,” Emming said. “Youth always comes with strange ideas.”
“He was moaning there in his bed,” Lehrer went on. “And he looked green. Honestly green. I was afraid I’d have to call the cunning man.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Geder said. “I only ate a bit too much.”
“A bit too much? A meal too much! Three meals too much! He must have gone faster than his gut could tell him no. I never saw a boy so sick. The feast night came, and he didn’t eat a thing. Only sat at the table looking queasy and miserable,” Lehrer said, then rubbed his hand on Geder’s knee. The old man’s eyes were bright and merry and filled with a kind of fond regret. “My poor boy. You tried so hard to do the right thing. My poor, poor boy.”
Before Geder’s expedition to the Sinir Kushku and his return with Basrahip, the Great Bear had been a place woven from threads of intimidation and desire. The center of masculine life in court, it was the place where Nellin Ostrachallin had composed a series of extemporaneous comic poems so lascivious and specific that Lord Bannien’s son had challenged him to a duel on the spot, certain that the verse was mocking his mistress. It was where, as a young man, Lord Ternigan and Lord Caot had entered into a series of debates before King Simeon that had set the framework of the crown’s policy toward Sarakal for a decade. To name it was to call into the imagination the smell of leather and tobacco and liquors. It was said that the servant girls there were not beyond quiet favors of a sexual nature. In Geder’s early days in the court, it had been a place where being the son of the Viscount of Rivenhalm was much the same as being nobody at all.
Now it was two dozen nicely put-together rooms, some private and some open, where he could sit and visit with his father. The tobacco was still there, but he’d never found a taste for liquor. If the servants would submit to sexual advances, Geder was too petrified by his imaginings of what they would say about him afterward to ever make the experiment. The occasional contest of poetry or rhetoric was amusing enough, but not so profound as his boyhood imaginings of it had been. The expansion of the empire by three new kingdoms had drawn many of the men who would have filled the chairs away to new holdings and cities. Many of the greatest names—Bannien, Kalliam, Maas, Shoat—were dead now. Geder found he almost regretted the change.
Emming’s laughter matched Lehrer’s, the older men moving from hilarity to chuckling like partners coming to rest at the end of a dance. Emming tapped the tabletop and gestured toward the back of the building. Geder nodded as his advisor and, Geder had to suppose, friend rose from the table and made his way back. Even the loftiest men in the kingdom were servants to their bladders.