“All it takes is gold,” Komme said, but there was a tremor in his voice when he said it. Cithrin sat back in her chair. She’d made her arguments. Going over them again would gain her nothing. Komme Medean was a smart man, and one who understood contracts, wealth, value, and power. Given time, he would see the world through her eyes. Chana pressed a knuckle against her lips, staring at Cithrin as if she were a puzzle the woman could solve by an act of will.
“If this fails,” Chana said, and then left the sentence unfinished.
Cithrin nodded. “If this fails, we will fall beneath the blades of Antea or be taken back to Camnipol and slaughtered by Geder’s own hand. That hasn’t changed. It isn’t as though we’re at greater risk than we were before.”
“And if we defeat Palliako and destroy Northcoast doing it?” Chana asked.
Cithrin shrugged. “The world is burning. Anything that doesn’t end in ashes is worth doing. And there’s also the possibility that it doesn’t fail. Perhaps instead, we shift what people think of when they think of money. Buying and selling with letters of transfer seems new and frightening to them now, but in three, four, five years, it will be commonplace. All of our partners and debtors will have been using them. The throne will have backed them for years. And when that happens, if that happens, we’ve become the keepers of the king’s debt.”
“If we’re the king’s debt,” Komme said, “then we’re the king.”
Cithrin smiled.
“Then we’re the king.”
They gave Cithrin liberty of the holding company’s compound but not of the city. She had expected less. If Komme had had the guards keep her to a room, she would have understood his position. Her record for following the edicts of the holding company could not have been worse. That he gave her leave to sit in the courtyard in the compound’s center and drink cool wine in the shade of the trees was a signal of sorts. She was not free to leave, and neither was she precisely a prisoner. She thought of it as being in a sort of personal escrow, kept in place for when she was wanted and until it was clear what she was wanted for.
As such, all she saw of Carse now was glimpsed through the narrow windows along the upper halls. Wide, grey streets and square buildings. High clouds puffed like cotton fresh from the boll. The air of Northcoast was warm enough, but with an undertone that made her think of the first warm days of autumn more than the last cool days of summer. In the courtyard, the vines and ivies rustled in breezes almost too gentle to feel and the fountain muttered and burbled to itself. At night, she didn’t sleep, nor did she expect to. At meals, she managed to swallow enough to keep her mind awake and alive, but little more than that. She knew to expect the anxiety, and so it was only an indisposition. The knot in her belly, the shapeless fear and dread, the craving for wine or beer or something stronger. She watched all of it happening to her, almost able to predict when the next wave would wash over her and when it would recede. In the meantime, grapes and cheese, water and wine. Not enough wine to untie her knots, though. She needed her wits more than the peace, and somewhere in her travels she’d learned how to suffer rather than indulge her need for strong drink.
There were a thousand things that might still go wrong. Even if Komme Medean convinced himself to follow her scheme, the ships might be captured or sunk. King Tracian might have a change of heart. Geder’s armies might come too quickly, overrunning Carse and Northcoast before her plans had time to take root.
She had loosed her arrow, and she could no more call it back now than pluck the moon from the sky.
The servants and members of the holding company treated her with respect and caution, as if speaking to her were itself a reckless act. She accepted their politeness and reserve as part of the price she was paying for her actions, but they chafed. She could not calm herself with alcohol or with the business of her bank. The only thing left was the thin comfort of news. What little she had of that came through Yardem and Kit and Marcus Wester, and it was not what she had expected.
Yardem’s and Marcus’s friends among the mercenaries of the north reported that Antea had been taking contracts with whatever companies Geder could find. All through the season, as the main body of the army had chased her in the southern coast of Birancour, the garrisons and keeps along Antea’s bloated borders had filled with hired swords, the Antean troops sent elsewhere. Where precisely was less clear. There were stories of fighting in Sarakal against the allies and remnants of the traditional families there, and also of the ongoing siege at Kiaria. There had been a rash of assassinations in Kaltfel as well, which commanded the attention of Northcoast more for its proximity than the scale of the violence. Thus far, at least. In the agonizing, slow hours between midday and twilight, she began sketching out a scheme for outbidding Antea’s contracts. So long as they were paying coin for services she could buy with paper, even a loss on her part was a victory of sorts. If she could frighten the Severed Throne into emptying its coffers, the war effort might stumble.
Of the army chasing her, information was considerably more complete, thanks to the reports of Paerin Clark’s anonymous ally. Who had been sending the letters remained unclear, but he had managed to make a place for himself first following the army and then, after Porte Oliva, sitting in council with its commanders. The false scent of Callon Cane in Sara-sur-Mar seemed to have distracted the Lord Marshal for the time being, and the season was coming to its close. Jorey Kalliam was as aware as she that winter favored the defenders, and that the men marching in his columns could be made loyal by the priests, but no story of a hidden goddess could feed them. Even a man persuaded that the great powers of the heavens loved him above all else could starve. However powerful a story might be, it had its limits, and the brute material world didn’t listen or care what priests and bankers told it.
She was not playing her games against the world, but the priests. The mundane stories of trade against the grandiose epics of slaughter and war. It struck her how deeply deceitful both narratives were. The banks pretended that business was stable, reliable, and a bit dull. The priests pretended that war was glorious. And the kings and regents pretended they were in control of it all.
Looking at it as dispassionately as she could, she gave herself about even odds of evading Geder’s reach. Unless some new information came to light, which to judge from history, it would.
For now, all she could do was wait for the ships to arrive. The gold, the pirates, Isadau, and the dragon.
Marcus found her one evening on the northwest corner of the compound’s high walls. The nature of the building as a keep within the city was clearer here than anywhere. The setting sun shone through the brick merlons, setting the high walk in stripes of fire and shadow. He wore old leathers, and for once didn’t carry the green sword on his back. The years had not been kind to him. She couldn’t recall now whether there had been grey in his hair during that last, strange caravan out of Vanai. There was now. It spread from his temples out like frost on a window. Long travel and the poisoned sword had made his face thinner, the lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes stark and deep. She remembered his shoulders being broader than they were now and his expression less tired.
She remembered when he’d been her protector. It seemed like a thing from a very long time ago. There was an impulse she couldn’t quite fathom to pretend to be helpless around him. To give him that place in her life again, even though she was quite aware it wouldn’t fit.
“Captain,” she said as he leaned forward, looking down at the street four stories below them. She made her voice sound light, the formal title made an intimacy by also being a joke.