“Until you repay the loan, Your Majesty,” Cithrin said. “Whenever that may be.”
Marcus said something under his breath. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was derisive. Yardem shrugged.
“The danger you are in is real,” Kit said. “Placating Antea will not save you. Listen to my voice. You must be ready when this comes.”
“How much gold are we talking about?” King Tracian asked. She took a deep breath. When she told him, his eyes went wide.
The master of coin was a thin-faced man younger than Marcus Wester and chosen for the position more by the nobility of his blood than his keen understanding of finance. She sat with the man in a comfortable drawing room that looked out over the sea. Their chairs were leather and wood, and the workmanship so solid they didn’t so much as creak. She drank wine and water and ate sugared almonds and salty cheese. He looked over the proclamation she’d drawn up and the terms of her contracts with the crown, scowling and scratching his chin. Kit sat across from her, lending the uncanny power of his voice less often than she had anticipated he would have to. Cithrin kept her hands folded in her lap, waiting for the guards to rush in at any moment, Komme Medean shouting and shrieking at their head.
The two points of critical importance—the exclusivity of her right to issue letters and the consequences of merchants flaunting the crown’s guarantee—hung in the back of her mind, the arguments she’d prepared to support them pressing to get out even before objections were raised. When the master of coin did balk, it was at trivia—the price she was charging the crown for silk and tobacco, how to make certain that no false letters were presented to the treasury. Cithrin responded to every query with dignity and grace because Kit and Cary and the players had taught her how to seem one thing while being something else. If her true self had been at the table, she would have been a creature entirely of laughter and contempt.
When she stepped out of the palace, the sun had already fallen into the western sea. A soft wind shifted through the wide streets, rubbing against Cithrin’s legs like a cat. A group of children ran across the square, chasing one another with laughter and tears. Seagulls wheeled overhead, their twilight-darkened bodies barely showing against the pearl-grey sky. The agreements were signed, King Tracian’s signature and seal already in place. The wealth on the ships still not arrived at Carse had changed as if by a cunning man’s trick. At the height of the day, it had been the capital of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. Now at evening, it was the property of the crown of Northcoast. Not hers any longer. She had traded it all for a parchment and a few hundred words. At her side, Kit lifted his eyebrows and glanced back at the palace behind them. Have we managed? Did it work?
Her smile was slow and broad and only a little more certain than her heart.
Marcus and Yardem finished exchanging their own banter with the captain of the palace guard, their voices bluff and masculine and uneasy. The pair made their way toward her, Firstblood and Tralgu. The poisoned sword slung across Marcus’s back caught the falling light and seemed to glow green.
“That was it?” Marcus said by way of greeting.
Cithrin lifted her eyebrows. The implicit threat was still in his mouth and the way he held his shoulders. He glanced down the streets around them, not looking directly at her, but watching for dangers she was nearly certain didn’t exist. Or at least not here. Or now. She looked to Yardem and made her gaze a question. Without seeming to move at all, the Tralgu looked pained. They were walking the paths of Wester’s history, and the tension in him was like seeing someone caught in an unexpectedly harsh current. What had happened here might be dead and gone to everyone else in the world, but he was still within it. For him it had never died, and so perhaps it never would. Or at least not while he lived.
She felt a tug of pity for him. “That was it, and it was enough,” Cithrin said.
“I owe Yardem a beer. You owe me a beer. So you buy him one and we’re all square?” Marcus said. “That’s the magic that’s supposed to let you defeat Geder Palliako in the field? Because it seems to me you’ve just given away a lot of gold.”
“I didn’t give it away,” Cithrin said, walking east. The rising night before her was studded with the first stars. Away to their left, the great carved dragon slept at the Grave of Dragons. Now that she’d seen a living example, she could appreciate how true the sculptors had been to their model. Always before it had seemed like an exaggeration. “I bought something with it.”
“Tracian’s goodwill isn’t worth that much,” Marcus said.
“That isn’t what I bought,” Cithrin said. “I bought the crown’s debt.”
“That’s like owning an empty hole and the air to fill it with, from what I can see.”
“That’s all he could see too,” Cithrin said. “He looked at me and saw a frightened woman with more money than sense. And he thinks he took advantage.”
“Well,” Marcus said, “he always was a snot-nosed little brat. His mother, at least, was someone to contend with.”
“He didn’t understand the implications of what he was doing,” Cithrin said.
“He’s got good company in that,” Marcus said, and then sighed. He squinted up at the moon, looking thinner and older and more fragile than her memory of him. She felt the urge to put her arm around him, lean her head against his shoulder as a daughter might to her father. Tentatively, she reached out, touching his elbow. At first he stiffened as if offended, then with a rueful smile he let her tuck her arm through his and walk on into the twilight city. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. As long as you understand it.”
“I do,” she said. “And Komme Medean will too. But he’s not going to like it.”
She would have liked to spend the evening in the city, moving from one taproom to the next, finding the places where musicians played in the cool and darkness, the gambling rooms where desperate men and women played at dice and tiles. Her time in Carse had been so long ago and with the distortions of memory seemed so brief, she wished she could take a few hours to pretend that the time in between hadn’t happened. That Suddapal still stood, that Pyk Usterhall still lived, that Geder Palliako might have found some other lover to occupy his time and attention. The risk was too high. There were too many people there who knew her on sight.
And in truth, what she wanted most was not to have to explain herself to the man whose fortune she’d just committed.
Still, on the way to Magister Nison’s branch, she did contrive to stop at a stand where a Dartinae girl sold bricks of cake and little cloth napkins filled with spiced pork and walnuts. She paused for a long moment at the council tower, looking up at its dark windows, ten floors above the cobbled street. Kit told stories of his travels in the city with the troupe and Yardem made laconic, gentle jokes about the people as they passed. She could feel Marcus softening a bit as they walked and the knot in her own belly starting to tighten. It was as if the alarm of his past was transferring into her and becoming an anxiety for the future. Nor was it the far future she feared. Geder and his blades, the spider priests and their creeping madness. They were the terrors of another day.
The moon was high in the sky and the western horizon utterly black when the moment came she could put off no longer. The holding company was built like a keep within the city. She walked to the great iron gate that stood closed against the uncertain traffic of the night. Two Tralgu guards in light scale armor with short, workmanlike blades stood at a rough sort of attention, but their ears shifted forward as she and the others approached.
“I’ve come to see Komme Medean,” Cithrin said before the guards could call her out.
“Household’s asleep,” the smaller of the two guards said. “You’ll have to wait for morning.”