The Spider's War

“I meant Sarakal, but either, I guess.”

“Maybe. Yeah, probably before the end of summer. It won’t matter, though. They’re roaches. We’re destined to win.”

“Yeah.”

They reached the station house, a room the size of a toolshed bound to the inner face of the wall. Arrows and bolts were stacked there in cylinders of twenty each. Hand axes for cutting lines if an enemy tried to climb. Long spears with hooks at the bases of the blades for pushing back ladders. The pair looked at it all for longer than they usually did.

“Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said again.

“Yeah.”

Marcus

I believe that history is a listing of atrocities and horror,” Kit said, gesturing widely with a cup of wine, “not because we are evil, but because history is itself a kind of performance. And we are fascinated by those events and characters which are most unlike our essential selves.”

“Wait,” Marcus said. “Just wait. You’re saying… are you saying that the whole blood-drenched history of the world—war after murder after war—says something good about humanity?”

Cary’s voice came from outside, lifted in a simple melody. Lak’s rougher, less practiced notes rose up around them to an odd but pleasant effect. The smell of nearby coffee and distant stables harmonized as well. Like a single green meadow in the ash fields after a forest fire, Palliako’s estate had become a small place of calm in a vast and implacable chaos.

The peace was an illusion created in the gap between understanding that trouble was coming and the appearance of banners on the horizon. Anytime the approaching enemy arrived even an hour later than expected, there was a limn of hope that maybe something unlooked for but not unwelcome had happened. Maybe this time the storm would turn aside. That the hope was doomed didn’t make it less precious.

“The truth of history, I can’t speak to, but the version we tell? I think yes,” Kit said. “I can’t see how any history could be complete and accurate. To be told at all, it must be simplified, and every simplification means something, yes? What we leave in, what we leave out, and how we choose tells, I suggest, a great deal about the teller.”

“I suggest you’re drunk,” Marcus said, laughing.

“It seems to me that what makes us human is our ability to create a dream and live within it. History, I think, is storytelling that begins, ‘Here is a thing that actually happened,’ but after you’ve said that, you’re constrained by all the same rules of technique and structure that a playwright or a poet labors under. Which was why I said that history itself is a kind of performance. Consider.” The actor held up a finger. “Why do you suppose there are no plays about good people being kind to each other? Thoughtful lovers who, in the face of adversity or misunderstanding, have a conversation between them?”

“Because they’d be terrible stories,” Marcus said, laughing.

“I agree,” Kit said, “and why is that?”

“Because nothing would ever happen.”

“It would, though. People would be thoughtful and kind and gentle and resolve their hurts and confusions with consideration and love. Those are things. They happen. And they seem like nothing. Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”

“That’s going to be a hard apple to sell all the men and women who’ve died hard in the last few years,” Marcus said. “Seems more likely to me that violence and strife catch the attention because ignoring them leads you down a short road. I’ve walked a lot of battlefields that had boys who’d have lived another few decades watering them. I’ve made my gold working at war and death, and I haven’t often gone hungry.”

“But war’s not the same as death, is it?”

“The one involves the other, Kit.”

“I disagree. War, I think, only involves a particular manner of death. Everyone always dies. It’s the price of being born.”

Marcus laughed. “All right. I don’t know anymore if you’re drunk or I am.”

Kit scowled, his beard bunching at the cheeks, as he stared into his cup. “I can’t judge you,” he said, “but I’m fairly certain I am.” A fly buzzed past them, and then away. Cary began her song again, and Lak joined in more gracefully this time. “I am afraid, Marcus. I’ve come to love the world, and I feel we’re on the edge of losing it. We won’t, will we? We can’t have come all this way through so many fires only to lose, can we?”

“If you knew this was going to fail, would it change anything you did?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“Either we’re about to end the dragons’ war for the last time, or go down to unremembered deaths in a world condemned to constant and unending war. However it comes out, what we’ve got to do is the same. So it doesn’t make any difference whether we win or lose. It’s the job.”

Kit rubbed a hand over his forehead. There was more grey in his hair than Marcus thought of him having, and it caught the sunlight. “It may be wrong of me,” Kit said, his voice melancholy and warm, “but I do wish you’d just told me you were sure we’d win.”

“You’d have known I was lying.”

The Kingspire stood in the northern reaches of Camnipol, close enough to the Division that it seemed the great height of the tower and the depths of the pit were commenting on each other. Marcus walked through the streets and alleys surrounding it, Yardem at his side, considering the great tower from every angle. The thing had been built to impress more than as a means of defending against attack. Unless it had been built for something else.

It didn’t look good.

From the east, after ambling among the tombs and mausoleums of generations of the noble dead, they reached the wall separating the grounds of the Kingspire from the streets of the city, too long and too low to effectively man. From the south, where the compounds of the most favored of the high families stood shoulder to rose-scented shoulder, the gardens and houses, servants’ quarters and kitchens and stables looked more like a medium-size village than the palace of a king. To the west was the Division, to the north the city wall. Marcus found a narrow stone-paved square and sat at the base of a bronze statue. Pigeons cooed and trotted to him, hopeful of crumbs or corn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Two hundred men, maybe?”

“To take it or to hold it, sir?”

“I was thinking hold it. Taking it… twice that.”

“Plausible.”

“Problem is, we’ve got you, me, a baroness, a banker, and a handful of actors. Hard to make that work for two hundred.”

“Is,” Yardem said. And then, “Do have the Lord Regent.”

“That’s Cithrin’s plan, but I was trying not to count on him,” Marcus said. “I have the feeling this will be the last time anyone will be able to put all the spiders in the same place at the same time. If they scatter after this, it’ll be the work of generations hunting them down. If it can be done. That’s not something I want to enter into without a fallback plan.”

Yardem nodded. “Do you have a fallback plan?”

“No.”

“Do you expect to find one?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. You?”

“No, sir.”

The puzzle of the thing was still shifting in Marcus’s mind, pieces of their conspiracy moving against each other, trying to find where one thing fit another. Geder Palliako hadn’t turned against them yet, and his visits to his compound were still rare enough they could pretend that he was coming for something other than the chance to moon over Cithrin. He hadn’t seen the dragon since their meeting in the forest, but Marcus had worked up enough pitch and sage to fill a brazier, and he thought he’d found a good place to put it. Clara Kalliam had started bringing more people into bits and pieces of a broader plan, aware that each new person who smelled smoke in the wind was another thousand chances for things to turn to shit. The foundation of the thing was all as stable as a drunkard, but it hadn’t fallen over yet. And the problems that bit at Marcus now weren’t the strategy, but the tactics.

The priests were arriving now in pairs and clusters. Basrahip apparently kept a complete record of them all in his broad head, and, according to Geder, greeted each of them by name when they appeared. As more and more came, their simple density was going to make keeping the plot a secret difficult. Putting them all in the temple at the Kingspire’s top shouldn’t, he thought, be too hard. Keeping them there until Inys arrived might be more of a trick, but what had to be done had to be done. Those plans were made, and if the details were still being tapped into shape, even that didn’t bother him deeply.

No, the splinter in his ass was all the things that they had to think wouldn’t be today’s problem. What Inys would do once he’d snuffed out the last of his brother. What Geder Palliako’s play would be once it was ended. Whether it was possible any longer to bring the scattered priesthood together and not have them each fall on the others with clubs and swords.

The spiders were engines of chaos, after all, and they’d been generating schisms and apostasy for months already. If they all wanted to be reconciled, they might all keep their blades sheathed. If they were already past that, Cithrin might be blundering into a half dozen dramas she knew nothing about. The moment when four assassins all arrived at the same garden was only funny when it happened on a stage.

And it wasn’t as if Marcus didn’t have some betrayals of his own to plan out.

“The smith?” Marcus asked.

Yardem shrugged and stood, as near to a yes as made no difference. Marcus sighed, rose, and turned his back to the Kingspire. Not carrying the poisoned sword left him feeling a little naked, but blending into the city was a better defense now than trying to cut his way through it. And he had his old blade at his side, in case trouble of the more usual kind arose. He made the attempt to fall into the flow of men and women in the streets and yards of the city, to be so much a part of the mood of Camnipol that it accepted him without noticing that it had done so. Two aging fighters on business of their own, and nothing more.

The street life of Camnipol was a strange and disjointed thing, though. Hard to fit into. There was a brightness and energy all around. The beggars capering on the street corners and the women rushing past with cages of live chickens slung over their shoulders, the old men of half a dozen races sitting in the cafés with pipes pinched in their teeth. Everyone had an air almost of celebration, and all of it echoed like thumping a hollow tree. Camnipol knew it was in danger, and was bent almost double with the effort of pretending otherwise. Smaller banners of the goddess hung from windows and over doorways, bright red and white and stark black, and as loud as a coward claiming bravery.

As they made their way to the southeast of the city, the stink of smoke slowly growing as they came near and the wind shifted, Marcus tried to imagine what it would have been like living through the dark years here. How many people had Palliako taken away to his little magistrate’s chamber to question? How many of those had come back? It was no surprise that the city was a tissue of false gaiety and desperation. None of them knew what was happening now, and no one had any idea what would happen next. For all that the girl selling cups of roasted nuts in the square knew, Geder Palliako would reign over Camnipol and Antea and the world under the spiders’ banner for the rest of her life. Or the Timzinae would come from the south and hang them all from their own windows. None of them guessed the goddess was false, or if they did they’d become expert at keeping the thought to themselves.

The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.

The smith’s yard belonged to a massive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. It sat near the city wall, where the smoke from the forges turned the air white and foul. When the servants announced them under the false names Geder Palliako had given them, the smith loomed up out of the depths of his shop. His arms were thicker than Yardem’s thighs and his skin stretched so much by the muscle that lines of pale skin made a lacework around the bronze of his scales. He shook their hands gently, like it required conscious effort not to break them.

“Come back,” the Jasuru said. “I’ll show you what we have.”

The smith’s yard went back farther than Marcus had expected, opening into a private courtyard with the forges off to one side. A pair of women were hauling out double handfuls of bright metal and arranging it on the paving stones. Marcus looked back into the shadows. All Pyre’s apprentices seemed to be women. The men, he assumed, had all been pressed into the army, and he wondered what would happen when they came back and tried to retake their places by the fires. The women stacking the weapons looked broad enough across the shoulder he wouldn’t have wanted to pick fights.

“This is what the Lord Regent was asking after,” Pyre said. “We’ve got a half dozen of these ready to put on carts if the army had a need, and we can make more. Take time, though.”

Marcus walked slowly around the metal. It was like a ballista, but built on a base that could shift and turn, tracking the vast body of a dragon through the sky. The bolts were light, but barbed as a fishhook, with a small pulley built into the shaft. The line that it carried out with it was finer than yarn and laid out to tug back on the bolt as little as possible, then tied to a braided cord. He imagined firing up into the dragon’s wings and belly and then trying to pull the line through enough to drag the great bastard out of the sky before it turned the weapon and everyone using it into slag and ashes. If he hadn’t seen the scars from it on Inys’s flanks, he’d have thought it wasn’t possible.

“Six of them is all?” Marcus said.

“All the rest went out,” the smith said. “They’re beautiful, but they aren’t fast work.”

“Fair enough,” Marcus said.

The smith crossed his arms and glanced nervously from Yardem to Marcus and back. “Should I put them on carts?”

Marcus shook his head. Honnen Pyre was asking if the dragon was likely to attack the army. That was his fear: the Timzinae and the dragon joining forces to destroy Camnipol. If Marcus told him to have the things delivered to the Kingspire, what would he make of that? And what were the chances that he’d keep his speculation to himself? If the priesthood found there was a secret shipment of weapons designed to slaughter Inys being installed around their temple, would that tip Cithrin’s hand or reassure them?

“Have them ready to move,” Marcus said. “We’ll send word where to take them when the time comes.”

Pyre nodded sharply and motioned to his apprentices. Marcus and Yardem made their way back to the street. Their rooms were halfway across the city from here, and Marcus’s feet felt sore. When they crossed the oiled and arching wood of the Silver Bridge, Yardem turned toward the courtyard of a taproom there without having to ask Marcus whether he wanted to stop.

The building was three levels tall, each narrower than the one below, with benches and tables on each. The walls were an unlikely yellow that caught the sunlight and made the whole place seem more cheerful. Beyond, the Division gaped, a canyon that was also a city. A Firstblood boy with black skin and hair brought them cider and took their coin. It was decent enough drink, but the pleasure of just sitting still was better than the best alcohol. At least for the time being.

“We’re going to need to a way to move through the Kingspire without drawing notice.”

“There are servants there,” Yardem said.

“We can’t use them. The more people we involve, the more likely someone’s going to step wrong.”

“I meant we could hire on,” Yardem said.

“Oh,” Marcus said. “Yes, there’s that.”

“Only?”

“It’s nothing. Just sits wrong to be a servant in Geder Palliako’s house.”

“Could see it as playing the role,” the Tralgu said.

“I’m too old to start worrying about dignity. You think Cary and the other players will be able to pass too?”

“Imagine so,” Yardem said. “They’ve done worse before now. But I can’t see them crewing the weapons to kill a dragon.”

“They won’t need to kill him. We just have to hold him in place until the locals can join the fray. This whole thing would be simpler if we could actually bring Karol Dannien into it on our side. There’s a perfectly capable army not a full day’s ride from here, and I can’t put it to use.”

“Life’s rich irony, sir.”

Philosophically, Marcus spat. “It strike you as odd that we’re looking to bring about peace in the world by killing a great bunch of people?”

“Think the peace part’s supposed to come after, sir.”

“That’s always the story. Ten more, a hundred more, a thousand more corpses, and we’ll be free.”

On the street, someone shouted. Another voice shouted back, and the people paused, shifting to the side to let a carriage ride past with the banner of the goddess jouncing at its side. It clattered onto the Silver Bridge and out across the abyss.

“More priests arriving,” Yardem said.

“Ah,” Marcus replied, dryly, “I guess that means we’re doing well.”

Geder

When it was over, Geder decided for the hundredth time. When Basrahip and the other priests were burned bones and ashes, then he’d kiss Cithrin.

It would be a moment of shared joy, after all. And it wasn’t as if she’d never kissed him before. They’d done much more. And there wouldn’t be a better time to bring her back to him. He’d have proven himself. He’d have saved the world. He’d be a hero. And in the wake of that, he would put his arm around her waist and pull her close to him, and…

It was so strange knowing she was close. That he could, if he chose, go to her anytime he wanted to, and there she would be. All his day’s work took on the feeling of dreams. He attended the wedding of Perrien Veren and Sanna Daskellin, sitting on a chair set aside for his own honor while the priest intoned a version of the rites, but Cithrin was in the city. He sat the long hours of the grand audience, listening to complaint and petition while it was really Basrahip that stood in judgment, and the hours didn’t bother him because he was borne up by his secret. And the promise of the time very soon when he’d proved himself to her.

Even apart from Cithrin’s presence, there were other little and unexpected joys. Basrahip, for example. From the moment he’d delivered his message, Geder had made a point of avoiding the great priest as much as he could. It had begun simply enough as an effort to keep his newfound secrets secret. But with every meeting he cut short, with every meal he ate away from the great bastard’s company, Geder saw something more than curiosity rising in the priest. There was a need there, a longing to know what it was that had been revealed to Geder. For the first time, Geder had power over the priest. It wasn’t Basrahip’s world any longer. His connection to his imaginary goddess had been undermined, and in a way that put him at Geder’s feet for once. And Geder’s mind was clear now. Clear and cool as river water. He’d hardly had any more moments of killing rage like the one in the Great Bear, and the few he’d had were justified.

There was a pleasure, he thought, that came from being outside a group. Looking back, he saw that he’d always really been like that. Before his journey to the Sinir Kushku, he’d been excluded from the charmed circle of Alan Klin and Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. It had ached for him only because he’d wanted so badly to be accepted, not because belonging gave him anything worth having. The moments of authentic pleasure he’d had in his life had all come from being apart. Reading alone in Vanai, for instance. Or the dark days after Dawson Kalliam’s insurrection, hiding with Aster and Cithrin, being protected by her friends who—through that—became his own. He’d always been at his best when he was his own man. Funny that it had taken him so long to understand it. He had been—still was—the Lord Regent of the greatest empire in the world. His commands, life and death. And what made him happiest in the whole time he could remember was that Cithrin was here, and Cary and Hornet and Mikel. Jorey’s mother and the bank’s mercenaries. And among them, with them, him. It was as if Lord Regent Geder Palliako had ceased to be, and he was only playing the part now.

His real friends were with him at last, and he hadn’t even known how much he’d missed them until they appeared.

Marcus Wester, dressed in the bright tunic of a servant, walked across the kingdom, stepping carefully over the dragon’s road between Kavinpol and Camnipol, then looking to the south and the markers of Jorey Kalliam and Canl Daskellin and the approaching Timzinae army. The man’s expression was a strange combination of amusement and despair. Geder found himself trying to imitate it. The Tralgu—Yardem Hane—stood with his feet in the blue glass beads of the northern sea, his arms crossed before him. The news of Kavinpol’s fall hung in the air between them like smoke.

“That’s going to make things harder,” Wester said, then turned to Geder. “We’re sure about the numbers?”

“No,” Geder said. “We aren’t sure about anything. But it’s what Daskellin wrote, and I don’t have a better source.”

Wester grunted. “All right. The next question’s whether Karol Dannien’s going to turn east to join them or keep pressing north.”

“North,” Yardem said.

“That’s what I figure too.”

“Is that bad?” Geder asked.

“It’s different, anyway,” Wester said. “We’re hard-pressed for good in any of this. We’ve slowed him to a crawl, but that was with support coming from the east. With that cut, Kalliam and Daskellin… well, I don’t see a way to keep Dannien in the field. Better to have them pull back to the city. The road up the cliff on the south’s a nightmare. We could hold it with two legless men and a slingshot. The question’s whether we want the siege to come in from the east or the west. He’ll go to one of them.”

“There are still priests coming in from the Keshet,” Geder said. “All of them from Asterilhold are here already.”

“And Birancour?”

“Soon,” Geder said, hoping it was true.

“Better to have Karol dancing out west of the city, then. So draw Jorey and Daskellin here”—he pointed to a hill to the east of Camnipol, where the landscape of Antea grew rough—“and here.” A small lake halfway between Kavinpol and the city.

“But the traditional families…”

“They won’t set foot out of Kavinpol,” Marcus said. “They’ve taken themselves a city, and they know better than to push on past their strength.”

He spoke the words with a bland matter-of-factness, but Geder felt the sting of them anyway. They would know better how to fight a war than he had. Well, that was fair, after all. They didn’t have Basrahip pouring poison in their ears. It wasn’t his fault the spiders had tried to ruin everything.

“I’ll send out the orders,” Geder said. “Anything else I should tell them?”

“No,” Marcus said. And then, “There hasn’t been any word from Magistra Isadau, has there?”

“There hasn’t,” Geder said.

“All right, then no. Just have them set up where I showed you and we’ll see what comes next.”

Geder made his way out first. So far as the court was concerned, he was planning out the rest of the war by himself. With Mecelli lost in his own despair and Daskellin in the field, the only one of his advisors left was Emming. And he’d been happy enough to leave Geder to himself.

He walked out to the gardens and the private house where King Simeon had spent his last days. Geder understood the sense of keeping rooms outside the Kingspire. Walking up numberless stairs for the pleasure of looking down over city and empire could get wearisome, especially for a man in failing health. He’d have been tempted to use the house himself just for the convenience of it, except that he’d been thinking of Basrahip’s comfort. Holding the royal apartments where he had given the big priest a way to come only halfway down from his temple. Geder didn’t care a wet slap about that anymore. Let the huge cow of a man puff his way up and down a dozen flights of stairs and have his priests haul him the rest of the way on a rope. It didn’t matter to Geder.

But the other reason not to was Aster. These wooden walls with their carved shutters, this fountain with its verdigris-taken statue of what was supposed to be a dragon, were the place Aster’s father had belonged. Better, Geder had thought, to leave it behind. Sitting with the sorrow would only make the boy sad.

And so, when Geder walked in and found Aster sitting beside the little fountain, it surprised him.

The prince wore a dark leather cloak, full cut in the style that Geder had started years ago, with a green sash that had only come into fashion this season. His hair was slicked back and dark with the water, and his face was terribly still. When Geder cleared his throat, announcing that Aster wasn’t alone any longer, the prince stiffened.

“Didn’t think to see you here,” Geder said.

“I can go if you want,” Aster said, and the raw hurt in the words felt like a slap. Geder paused.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Aster said. “Everything’s fine.”

The water chuckled and murmured to itself as he came nearer. He more than half expected Aster to rise up and storm away, but he didn’t. The prince only kept his gaze fixed on the water and scowled. It was an expression Geder knew well, though from the other side of it. He’d worn it enough himself.

“Is it something I did?” he asked, gently. “If it is, I’ll apologize. If it’s someone else… I don’t know. Maybe we could think of some way to make me useful?”

“It’s not you. It’s not anyone,” Aster said. And then, a moment later and softly, “It’s me.”

“Feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?” Geder said, his words pressing gently to see where the hurt was and trying not to make it worse. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. But if you do want—”

“Then what?” Aster shouted. “You’ll take time out of your busy schedule to nursemaid me? Put a rag in some warm milk so I can suck on it? Why would you suddenly start caring about me?” The pain in the boy’s voice was like violence.

“I’ve been thinner on the ground than I should be,” Geder said. “That’s truth. I’m sorry for it.”

“Why be sorry? You’re busy doing all the things that I should be. If I could. Trying to keep everything from falling apart because I can’t. And all the armies and the dead men and…”

When Geder took the boy’s hand, Aster tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let him. By main force, he pulled Aster close, wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders, and held him. Aster struggled for a moment, trying to break free, and then the sobbing came in earnest and he held tight to Geder instead.

He’d been a fool to forget Aster. All the effort that Geder had put into avoiding Basrahip and the other false priests had also kept him away from the boy, and that was a cruelty he hadn’t intended. He thought of all the confusion and pain he’d suffered before Cithrin came. The sense of wrongness that had filled the world and his heart and everything in between. Of course Aster felt the same things, only more so because he was young and fatherless and doomed to spend a lifetime on the throne that Geder had the chance to walk away from. In Geder’s mind, Aster was still a child, and what you didn’t point out to him he wouldn’t know. Likely he’d been wrong about that last part even when the first had been true.

“I don’t know why I feel this way,” Aster forced out between sobs. “The war. And you calling all the priests back. And spending all your time away. I know everything will be all right, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel it that way.”

Geder shushed the prince gently, and rocked him back and forth the way he remembered his own father rocking him.

“It’s my fault,” Geder said. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I thought it would be easier for you not to know, and I was wrong. And I’m sorry. This was my fault.”

“I don’t understand,” Aster said. A life’s burden of longing fell in the last word, and Geder kissed the boy’s temple.

“Come with me,” he said, “and you will.”

Watching the reunion of Cithrin and Aster was like getting to live his own moment over again. The boy’s shock and confusion and then Cary and the others sweeping him up in their arms, grinning and laughing and telling Aster how much he’d grown and changed. Aster’s smile was more the blank look of a man stunned than actual joy until Master Kit led him to the garden to explain.

In the withdrawing room with its screens and lemon candles, Cithrin looked like a picture of herself painted by an artist who loved her. She wore her white-pale hair braided back and a thin summer dress with loops of silver at the shoulders that caught the warm light of the sunlight and remade it. The murmur of voices—the apostate priest and the crown prince of Antea—drifted in on the evening’s breeze. His father came in briefly and then made a pointed show of being needed elsewhere and left them alone again.

Geder couldn’t tell if the silence between them was comfortable or charged. He wished more than he’d ever wished anything that he knew Cithrin’s mind. A summer beetle tapped against the screen, trying to reach the candle flames, then gave up and buzzed away into the afternoon sun.

“I wanted to…” he began, and then found he didn’t know what he was going to say next.

Cithrin shifted to look at him. In truth she looked older than he remembered her. Her Cinnae blood meant she would always be unnaturally thin, unnaturally pale. He could trace the veins beneath her skin. Her smile seemed genuine, though. Encouraging, but the way she’d have encouraged Aster. To speak, perhaps. Not more than that. When the time came to do what he’d promised himself he would do, pull her close to him, enfold her in his arms, kiss her again as he had once before, it was going to take more courage than anything he’d ever done. He could feel himself balking at it even now. He found himself breathing shallowly and made a point of not glancing at her breasts. He wasn’t going to embarrass himself. He wouldn’t do that.

Through main force of will, he kept his voice from shaking. “I wanted this, you know.”

“This?” she said, the smallest lilt making the word glide a little.

“All this,” Geder said. “I wanted to be someplace nice, with you. Where we weren’t worried that someone was going to try and kill us at any moment. With a little breeze and the smell of flowers. Aster somewhere we could hear him. That’s silly, isn’t it? Like having a little family. I’m Lord Regent of Antea. I could have anything I want, but this… this is nice.”

“It is,” Cithrin said.

“I was thinking of kissing you,” he said, “but I was afraid you’d laugh at me.”

The air in the room seemed to go solid. Nothing moved. He looked down at the floor. Someone had tracked in lumps of mud and grass. He might have doen it. He couldn’t be sure. The brightness and excitement faltered in him, and settled into a kind of peace. He’d said it. It was done. He’d jumped off the bridge, and there was no taking it back now. Either he’d fall or he’d fly.

He glanced up at her. Her gaze was on him, her face expressionless. The candles danced in the pale blue of her eyes, sparks living inside ice.

“It’s stupid, I know,” he said. “But there it is. Every time I think of it, I remember coming to Suddapal thinking you’d be there. Rushing through the streets like an idiot. And then…” He pressed his lips together, as if the pressure could keep the memory at bay. Humiliation shifted in his heart like a snake in darkness. He gestured vaguely, trying to explain something to her, show something to her.

Her voice, when it came, was perfectly calm. “Do you think about the people you’ve killed?”

Geder blinked, thrown off by the change of subject. “Who? You mean Dawson?”

“Dawson Kalliam,” Cithrin said. “The others who fought with him. Lord Ternigan. The people of the court who weren’t loyal enough. The men and women in Elassae and Vanai. Sarakal. Birancour. The hostage children. All of the thousands who would be alive if things had gone a little differently. Do you think of them?”

For a moment, he saw the little Timzinae girl in his memory. The one he’d had called back from the edge. And the silhouette of a woman against the flames of a burning city. “I do sometimes,” he said, and sighed. “I don’t like to, but I do. Why do you ask?”

“I have never laughed at you.”

Outside, Aster said something and Kit responded. A bell rang from somewhere deeper in the house, and a man’s voice called out. The door slave, most likely. Geder couldn’t look away from her. So many nights, all he’d thought about was her mouth, her body, the look in her perfect eyes. His heart felt full and heavy with her presence, like it was the only real thing there was about him.

“Thank you,” he said softly, and she nodded. Footsteps hurried toward them from the house. Geder didn’t know if he wanted them to turn aside or hurry to him. The moment was perfect and painful and too rich to stand for long. When the knock came at the door, Geder looked deep into Cithrin’s perfect eyes and said Come in as if the words meant I love you.

His father entered the room, his eyes bright with excitement. He held a scrap of paper in his hand, yellow and black in the light of the candles. “There’s a message come, my boy,” Lehrer said. “From the Kingspire. A message.”

Geder rose as his father pressed the paper into his hand. The script was Basrahip’s. He recognized the shapes of the letters even before he read the words. It said a great deal about where Geder and Basrahip had been and what they had become that the priest used these dead words he so much despised to seek Geder out.

“They’ve arrived,” he said. “The last of the priests have come to the temple. Basrahip wants to know when I want them to gather so that I can share my revelations.” Cithrin made a small noise at the back of her throat and closed her eyes. It might have been joy or fear or something of both. He tucked the paper into his belt. “What should I tell him?”

“Tomorrow, midday,” Cithrin said. “That will give us time to arrange everything we need.”

“Tomorrow then,” Geder said with a sharp nod. I will kiss you tomorrow.

Cithrin

The day moved quickly and quietly as a rat in a dining hall. Marcus brought the actors out to the gardens, drilling each of them in turn, Yardem at his side. Geder, thankfully, went back to the Kingspire to make a full night of preparations there. As many of the servants and guards as could be sent away from the great structure would be. Even the royal guards were to be stationed outside the royal quarter, their backs to the Kingspire ready to fend off some imagined attack from the streets. And Geder had taken Aster with him, which cut Cithrin’s heart a little. Seeing the boy, she’d realized she’d missed him. Or if not quite him, at least the thought of him. In a better world, she’d have known Aster more.

The little drawing room by the garden became a war room. Or no, not that. Something like it, but dedicated to something different. As desperate, as dangerous, as likely to end in sudden death, but different. She had to believe that.

“We’ll need to have the letters out to the farms as soon as the couriers won’t get cut down by the Timzinae,” Cithrin said.

“We could send them to the south,” Clara suggested.

“They won’t leave the south road open. The main body of the army will swing to the west, but they can’t have a siege with an open route to the south.”

“No,” Clara said. “No, of course not.”

The siege of Camnipol that would mean the end of the Antean Empire. The death of Clara’s friends and family, the sacking of her city. It was the war they were trying to stop, it and all the wars after it. Or as many of them as Cithrin could.

“The gaol will be the first thing,” Cithrin said. “And after that…”

“I have… friends ready,” Clara said. “I’ve sent word. When we go out the gates, we’ll be well accompanied. There’s a baker I used to frequent near the Prisoner’s Span? I have him devoting himself to raisin cakes and lemon bread. And there’s a footman who used to serve at my house. Back when I had a house. He’s gathering up toys. Dolls, you know. Little things for the children.”

Cithrin took Clara’s hand, and the older woman’s head bent forward. Wet tracks slid through the powder on her cheeks, and Cithrin felt tears of her own coming up in answer. She didn’t know what they were for. She thought Isadau would have understood.

“I feel as if I’ve been playing at making peace my whole life. Only playing. Now I look at all my nation has done,” Clara said, “and I think we’re going to defend ourselves with children’s baubles and ribbon. A knife will cut through that so quickly, and so deep.”

“It’s how peace gets made,” Cithrin said. “At least I hope it is.”

“It is when it is,” Clara said, “but I wonder whether we deserve mercy.”

“It isn’t mercy if you deserve it. Mercy justified is only justice.”

Clara laughed once and mirthlessly. “That has all the virtue of being true and none of the comfort.”

“It wasn’t mine. Someone told me it once. I don’t remember who.”

“Someone with more mind than heart,” Clara said, and looked at the candle on the little table by the wall. It had already burned a third of its length. “I should go back now. It would be strange if I weren’t at Lord Skestinin’s home.” Her voice carried a burden of dread, and she wiped at the tears angrily.

“Is there something happening there?” Cithrin asked.

“Yes, dear. My son the priest has come home from Birancour. Vicarian is no doubt waiting for me.”

And you will let him go to his death, Cithrin thought. The two women were silent for a long time before Clara rose, placed her hand briefly on Cithrin’s head as if passing her a blessing, and left. Cithrin sat alone after that, listening to the patter of moths against the screens and the voices of Sandr and Lak, Charlit Soon and Cary, Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane and Lehrer Palliako. Her chest hurt, just between her breasts and up a little, and she tried to remember if she’d been hit there. It felt like a bruise, but she came to the conclusion it was only sorrow and nothing to be done about that.

She was in her room near midnight, a third bottle of wine on its way to ignominious death by her hand, when the soft knock came at the door. She rose, sat, and rose again more carefully. The little twinge of shame she felt at being drunk was easy enough to push away. Without the wine, she’d have been sick hours ago. She opened the door, her chin already lifted in defiance. Marcus Wester stood alone in the corridor, not even Yardem at his side.

He looked old. Still strong, but old. His hair had gone whiter since the first time she’d seen him on the caravan from Vanai. His skin had a transparency despite a lifetime of being roughened by the sun. His eyes were the same, though, and the way he held himself.

He nodded to her. “You sent for me?”

“Hours ago,” she said. “I assumed you’d chosen not to come.”

“Lost track of time. Night before an action, I’m always worried.”

She held the bottle out to him. “So am I.”

He hesitated, but only for a moment. He sat on the little stool beside the washbasin and she sat on the bed. He was a handsome man, well bruised by the world. He wore his scars and weariness gracefully. She wondered whether, when she was as old, she would do the same. He wiped the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve and drank. Smacking his lips, he passed it back to her.

“Not bad,” he said.

“I didn’t see call to save anything for a better occasion.”

“Well, there’ll be a better one along shortly or else not at all,” he said.

“Call this a hedge, then. If we lose, at least I won’t have spared the good wine.”

“Thanks for sharing it.”

“And,” she said, and then faltered. She looked at her feet. The room wasn’t spinning. She wished that it were. If her mind had lost a little more of its clarity, this might have been easier. “Thank you. For being who you’ve been to me.”

“Not sure what you—”

“Don’t. Not now. Not tonight.”

It was the mercenary captain’s turn to look away. “Right. Night before the battle. Sorry.”

“I met you when I was a child who thought walking outside the city walls was like jumping off a cliff. I have taken terrible risks with myself and the people around me, and I’ve won more than I lost. And you have done everything you could to keep me safe. We don’t talk about it. We don’t say it. But it’s true, and I want you to know that I appreciate it. All of it.”

“It’s the… Hell. Yeah. All right.” Marcus took a deep breath and held his hand out for the bottle. This time when he took it, he nearly drained it. “You’re near the age my daughter would have been. A little younger now than my wife was when I met her. You’re not them, but you fit in that part of my head for a time.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be them.”

“No, not that. Be sorry for something else if you have to, but not for that. I did what I did because I thought it wanted doing. That’s all. And I knew you weren’t my daughter. Yardem kept pointing it out, for one thing. It’s been… it’s been the longest, strangest job I ever took. I always thought of bankers as being dull.”

She laughed. “We want you to think that.”

His sheepish grin made him look younger. She could see who he’d been as a boy. “Picked up that part. Took me long enough, but I see it. You… you didn’t know your parents, yeah?”

“I remember remembering them, but nothing more than that.”

“For all this? They’d be proud of you, scared as hell, I expect, but proud.”

“They don’t care,” Cithrin said, taking back the bottle. “They haven’t cared in decades. They’re dead.”

She drank the wine to the dregs. There had been a bitterness in her words that surprised her. If someone else had said it, she’d have said they sounded hurt, but she didn’t feel it. To her surprise, Marcus laughed. “You’re one ahead of me, then. Fine. I’m proud of you, then. Proud to know you, proud to work for you. Proud of all you’ve done, though God knows I don’t understand half of it.”

“If we die tomorrow…”

“Then we do,” Marcus said with a shrug. “If it’s all the same, I’d prefer to go first. Bad for my reputation if you die before me, and it’s hard enough to get jobs when you won’t work for kings.”

“I’ll try to survive, then.”

“Do that,” Marcus said. He looked up at her from under lowered brows. “What are the chances I’ll be able to keep you from coming to the Kingspire?”

“Poor,” Cithrin said.

“I’ll be there to call Inys. Yardem’s going to run sheepdog on Palliako. Chances are decent that the dragon’ll follow up killing the priests by turning everyone else there to slag. Not sure how having you present’s going to improve things.”

“You might get your wish and die before me,” Cithrin said. “If you fall, I’m picking up your damned blade myself.”

The last morning—she couldn’t think of it as anything else—dawned without a moment of sleep behind it. The day came early in the high summer, and rich with birdsong and the clatter of carts in the streets. Cithrin washed, changed into the robes that would let her pass as a servant, and tried to prepare her heart for what was to come. She could as easily have willed herself to fly.

The sunlight slanted in from the east when they set out through the cobbled streets. Lehrer Palliako led them, riding a tall black horse and bright clothes like a man heading for a festival. Or, less charitably, performing at one. He was there to be seen and to draw any casual attention to himself and away from the motley train of servants behind him.

For the first few streets, Cithrin felt her heart in her throat. But with every corner they passed, every tradesman who pulled aside to make way for the Lord Regent’s father, every street cleaner waiting with barrow and shovel for them to pass, every beggar and child and half-wild dog that saw them without any light coming into their eyes, she felt a strange elation growing in her.

No one knew, and so no one saw. They were disguised as much by their improbability as by their robes. The grey-haired Kurtadam woman selling wilted cabbages in the square lived in a world where the question was how the goddess and the Lord Regent were going to defeat the roach army. If she even thought of that. More likely, she wasn’t even concerned with that so much as whether she’d be able to get rid of her produce before it started to rot. The baker’s boy with his handcart piled with sacks of flour didn’t see a suspicious bunch of servants trailing after an anxious-looking nobleman so much as an obstacle in his morning errands that he had to track around. Cithrin walked among them unrecognized either for herself or the change she was about to bring upon them all. Or try to, at any rate.

Geder waited at an ivied archway, the entrance to one of the royal gardens. He wore a light summer tunic with braiding of gold down the sides, and the crown of his regency on his head. His personal guard stood along the edge of the garden, facing out, and created the sense of a wall even in the stretches where no actual wall existed. When the guard stood aside to let the grooms help the Lord Regent’s father off his mount, Cithrin had to bite her lips to keep from laughing. She was fairly certain that once she’d started, it would have been hard to stop, and it wouldn’t be the sort of laughter that promised sanity.

After the press and noise and stink of the streets, the royal quarter seemed too quiet and sparsely peopled to be part of the same city. No gardeners tended the deep-green hedges and breeze-shuddered flowers, no slaves sang at the little hidden corners to sweeten the summer air for the court. It was expected, of course. She’d told Geder to send as many people as he could away. To see it all in motion was eerie all the same.

Once they were out of sight of the guard, Geder stopped pretending to walk with his father and came to her side. His eyes were bright and he bounced on the balls of his feet with every step, like a boy excited for cake.

“The pieces are in place?” Marcus asked even before Geder could speak.

“The blacksmith delivered them this morning,” Geder said.

“The priests?” Cithrin said. Something passed through Geder’s expression that she couldn’t read, a flicker here then gone that reminded her of the day she’d seen him cut down Dawson Kalliam. She was almost pleased to see it.

“Gathering. It isn’t like it was before, but I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or I have. It seems like there’s more fighting now. They rub each other the wrong ways all the time. Basrahip’s been going to all of them and promising how they’ll all be reconciled and I have seen her plan.”

“Both true,” Cithrin said, “if not the way he means it.”

“He keeps asking to see me before the gathering at the temple, but I’ve put him off. Better not to have the chance for things to go wrong.”

Cithrin made a little sound of agreement.

When they reached the entrance of the Kingspire, the wide doors stood open and the great halls beyond empty. From so near, the banner of the goddess was only a shifting darkness that clung to the walls high above her. A shadow the light couldn’t dispel. The sun had risen higher than she’d expected, the morning more than half-gone already.

Master Kit and Cary huddled for a moment with the rest of the players, bowed their heads together the way they sometimes did before a performance. Marcus stood at Geder’s side, ignoring the Lord Regent’s almost palpable annoyance. Rough cloth wrapped the poisoned sword on his back, too valuable to discard and too dangerous to expose, especially here where so many of the priests might know it for what it was.

A sparrow flew past, its fluttering brown wings loud in the air.

“Torch ready?” Marcus asked.

“On the dueling ground,” Geder said, nodding to the west and the great chasm of the Division. “All that needs is lighting. How… how long will it take before the dragon comes?”

“Damned if I know,” Marcus said. “Great bastard may not show up at all.”

He clapped Geder’s shoulder and walked away. Geder glanced from Cithrin to Yardem to the captain’s sword-crossed and retreating back. “He’s joking, isn’t he? The dragon’s coming. It’s going to be here.”

“There’s always some element of improvisation in the plan,” Yardem said mildly, and flicked his ear. “Looks a long way up. We should go. You staying here, Magistra?”

Cithrin clasped her hands behind her back so tightly that her knuckles ached. Everything in her body was stretched so tightly that she felt the way a viol string sounded. Clara and Aster would be waiting by the path to the gaol, ready to go with her as soon as Geder returned. There was so much to do and so much doubt. She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be waiting when you come back.”

Geder surged forward and took her hand in his. His eyes were intense and dark, his mouth in a scowl that was meant to be heroic. “We will return,” he said, then turned to Yardem and spoke with a false lightness. “We’d best get started. As you said, it can be a long way up.”

Yardem nodded to her and smiled his placid canine smile that might have meant anything: He’s green or Don’t worry, it will all work out or It’s been good knowing you. Cithrin felt the urge to take the Tralgu man in her arms, but she was afraid that Geder might take it as a precedent. “Thank you, Yardem,” she said.

She watched them walk into the vast mouth of the tower. A moment later, the high priest joined them. She watched as the huge man traded words with Geder that she could not hear, and then walked away. She stood for a moment, her heart a complication of elation and fear and a vast anticipated grief.

When she walked away into the gardens, the actors were setting the weapons at the ready on the rough gravel paths. The bright steel looked wrong in Sandr’s hands, and she realized she’d become so accustomed to seeing mock weapons in their hands that the bright steel of the real thing seemed wrong. Cary’s laughter seemed to echo the birdsong. Sandr and Hornet and Mikel snapped and argued like they were trying to put together a stage.

Marcus strode to the knot of men, Lak at his side, and pulled Sandr and Mikel away from the weapon. He shook his head in an amused sort of disgust and strode off toward the dueling yard. It was all so familiar and also so estranged from all she knew. A dream she couldn’t wake from. The minutes stretched, time bending itself like a fiddler’s arm to make her nerves ring.

“You look thoughtful,” Kit said.

“If I am, I don’t know which thoughts they are,” Cithrin said. “I can’t tell if I’m stuffed so full of them I can’t tell one from the other, or if I’m emptied of them.”

The old actor put a hand on her shoulder. His smile consoled her.

“When I was a child,” she said, “I had a nurse called Old Cam. She wasn’t really my nurse, but she took the role on as no one else was doing it. I remember once I was climbing a wall that I wasn’t supposed to. I was… eight years old at the time. Maybe nine. And I was afraid she’d catch me and punish me, and I hoped she would come and give me a reason not to go further.”

“Hoping for someone to rein us in?” Kit asked.

“Astounded that no one has,” she said.

“It’s been my experience that the world is often—”

“Cithrin!”

Aster’s voice cut through the warm air like a blast of winter. Had someone heard him? The prince sprinted out of the Kingspire, his eyes wide and his mouth a gape of horror. She found herself running toward him before she saw him. His chest worked like a bellows and he grabbed at her sleeve, shaking with distress.

“What is it?” she said, willing the boy to catch his breath and dreading what he’d say.

“Basrahip,” Aster said. “He knows.”

Clara

It had gone so well for so long, it was hard to believe how little it took to destroy it.

Clara had left Lehrer Palliako’s house after conferring with Cithrin bel Sarcour, knowing she’d stayed too late. She’d arrived at Lord Skestinin’s manor irrationally certain that by being tardy, she’d given the game away. Instead, laughter had greeted her at the doorway. The door slave nodded to her happily as she went in, and the footman led her to the largest of Lord Skestinin’s drawing rooms. The thing that had been her son sat on a divan dressed in priestly white. Sabiha and Lady Skestinin sat with him, and little Annalise cooed in his lap, reaching up toward his chin with thick, innocent fingers. The impulse to snatch the baby away was too much to resist, but she was able at least to make it seem like greed for the babe’s company more than fear.

“Mother!” the thing that had been Vicarian said, putting his arm around her. “Here I was afraid you’d taken off to fight in the war again.”

“Don’t be clever, dear,” she said, and kissed his cheek because it was something she would have done. “I’m certain Jorey has no need of me at the moment.”

“And he did before?” The mockery in his voice was gentle and warm and familiar. It was how he would have spoken before the spiders had taken him.

With her son, she could have laughed or lied or done whatever she pleased. With this one, every comment was an interrogation, every answer an evasion desperately trying not to seem evasive. “The need might possibly have been my own,” she said, matching the lightness of his tone. “I see you’ve met your niece.”

“Indeed I have,” Vicarian said. “She’s more charming than she has any right to be, given the hour.”

“She’s always stayed up late,” Sabiha said. “Ever since she was born.”

Clara put the child in her mother’s arms, took Vicarian by the wrists, and led him back to the couch and away from the baby. She imagined that his skin moved under her fingers. Tiny bodies crawling through the veins like living clots. Like a man already dead and worse than dead. She could picture too easily one of the little things slipping out of Vicarian’s mouth and stealing into the baby’s. She didn’t let go of him, even as her own flesh crawled. “Jorey was just the same,” she said. “He was always brightest when everyone else was half-dead from exhaustion. By everyone else, of course, I mean myself and his wet nurse. What was her name? Idrea, I think. Something like that. Lovely woman, though of course I haven’t needed a wet nurse for something near twenty years now, and even if I did, I can’t think she’s still in that line of work. One’s body cannot last forever, after all, and don’t look like that, dear. You’re in a house of women now.”

“I consider myself warned,” he said.

“But tell me everything,” she said. “What news from Porte Oliva?”

It wasn’t so hard from there, prodding him to speak about himself. Vicarian had always had a bit of the showman in him, and he enjoyed taking even so small a stage as this. The coffee in Birancour was better than in Camnipol. Porte Oliva was already starting to regrow after its difficult year. Trade ships from Lyoneia had begun negotiating fresh contracts. He’d had a report of Korl Essian, off on a treasure hunt for Geder Palliako and the throne, that made some fairly outlandish claims about tunnels passing under the depths of Lyoneia and a buried machinery deep underground that connected in some obscure fashion to dreams. He’d brought the report with him, ready to deliver to Lord Regent Palliako tomorrow.

Tomorrow. When Vicarian, who didn’t realize he’d been killed long ago, could finally be put to rest. Her throat ached and her eyes fought tears the whole night. Lady Kalliam left first, and then Sabiha and the child. When Clara rose to go, Vicarian rose with her and put his arm over her shoulder as they walked down the hallway together.

“Jorey’s a lucky man,” he said. “This Sabiha seems a genuinely good woman.”

“I’ve become quite fond of her,” Clara said. It was true. She could say it. Everything now she had to judge before it left her mouth. Was it true, did she believe it, would it give away more than she meant it to? Vicarian tipped his head to the side, resting it against her even as they walked, just the way he’d done before.

For a moment, she was taken by the transporting memory of a five-year-old Vicarian bringing her a sprig of lilac, his hands and feet caked in the garden mud. She’d knelt beside him, torn between amusement and annoyance. He’d pressed it in her hand with such solemnity and then touched his forehead to hers. It had been a gesture of such simple love from a boy to his mother. She’d thought then and for years after that it would be among her most treasured memories. Now it hurt.

“Good night, Mother,” he said, stepping away. “Will I see you in the morning?”

“I was hoping to walk to the Kingspire with you,” she said. “I have some business there.” True. All true.

“I would be honored, my Lady Kalliam,” he said with a flourish and a bow. Then, in a more prosaic voice, “We really do have to do something about getting Jorey the family title back. He’s earned it, that’s clear enough. And it feels odd not being able to call you baroness. Lady’s too general. Could mean anyone.”

“It would be dowager baroness now,” Clara pointed out. You were such a good boy. Such a good man. I am so sorry that I’ve lost you.

“Near enough,” the thing that had been her son said. “Good night, Mother.”

She could not say good night in return. It wasn’t a good night. It was a terrible one. Instead, she made herself ignore the things lurking under his skin and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Vincen waited in her apartments, sitting by the window as faithful as a dog. As a husband. They didn’t speak, he only held her as she wept, muffling her sobs with his shoulder and the enfolding comfort of his arms.

As they rode through the city streets together in a small and open carriage, Clara’s gaze kept drifting to the Kingspire. The bloody banner of the goddess hung almost motionless and dark, heavy still with dew. This is the last day I will see it there, she thought. Tomorrow, it will be gone or I will. The fear and excitement and grief and rage all fused together in her body. Like metal in a forge, she became an alloy of herself, stronger than anything pure could be. Or so, at least, she hoped. Vincen rode behind, but not too close.

“You’re quiet this morning,” Vicarian said. Clara smiled.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Can I ask you something?”

Her heart began to tumble in her chest, but Vicarian’s demeanor hadn’t changed, or if it had it was only a bit embarrassed. She saw no malice in him, or no more than she ever did since the change. “If I may reserve the right not to answer, I don’t see why not,” she said, forcing a lightness she did not feel.

Vicarian nodded more to himself than to her. He rubbed his palm against his cheeks. It was a gesture he’d learned from his father, and seeing it here felt like an omen. Not a good one. “Mother, did you think no one would find out?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. She lied, and she saw in his face that he knew. But he hadn’t revealed the plot yet, had he? Surely if he’d told anyone, she’d be on her way to the gaol in chains, and Cithrin and the others beside her. The gaol or the Division. Perhaps there was something in him that was still her son, Dawson’s son. She held her breath.

“He’s my age,” Vicarian said. “Or if he’s older, not by more than a few years. And he’s a servant. A huntsman? What would Father think?”

Clara lowered her head. Bright relief ran against shame. It wasn’t the banker and the dragon he’d discovered. It was Vincen.

“I hope your father would understand,” she said. There was no point in denying it.

“Jorey has done everything he could to return the Kalliam name to dignity,” Vicarian said. “I love you, Mother. Never doubt that. But you’ll become a joke in the court. Chasing after the army was peculiar enough, but at least there was a way to tell the story that you did it from bravery and love of the throne. Spending your nights with your dead husband’s huntsman?” He shook his head. “You know this has to stop. If not for your own dignity, for Jorey’s. And Sabiha and Annalise. Can you imagine what that little girl’s life will be like if the name she took from you comes to carry the reputation for fucking the servants?”

The truth was, she hadn’t. Now that she did imagine it, she didn’t like the picture. She didn’t ask how he’d found her out. It didn’t matter.

“This has to stop,” Vicarian said, “before someone else finds out.”

“You’ve made your point.”

They were almost at the low wall and the wooden gate that led to the paths of the royal quarter. The huge priest, Basrahip, stood by the open gate, embracing another man who looked much like him. One of the original priests come from the Keshet, she supposed. She was a fool. An idiot. A randy old widow like the jokes all painted, and it had taken her monstrous son to show her how she looked through other people’s eyes.

“It has to stop,” he said again.

“I said you’ve made your point.”

He turned away with a grunt, and the carriage stopped. She heard Vincen’s horse clatter to a halt, but she couldn’t look back to him. She stepped out of the carriage, her legs unsteady beneath her. Did Lady Kalliam know? Did Sabiha? Did Jorey? And if it did stop, if she did send Vincen away as she’d always known in her heart she should, what of her would be left?

“Brother Kalliam,” the huge priest said, wrapping his arms around Vicarian’s shoulders.

“Minister Basrahip,” the thing that had been her son said, returning the embrace. “You remember my mother?”

“Of course,” Basrahip said, bowing to her. “The fearsome Lady Kalliam and the swordsman who fights at her side.”

Did he know too, then? Only, no. Basrahip and Vincen had met each other before. Had faced Feldin Maas together once in some long-vanished world. God. How had she ever thought that any part of her life could be kept safe from any other? Everything mixed. Everything bled into all that surrounded it.

“Are you well, my lady?” the priest asked.

“Fine. Or, no. I’m not. But I’ll be fine, Minister Basrahip,” she said. “I find I need to refresh myself.”

“There are no servants or guards to lead you,” he said, apology in his voice. They were all so goddamned polite. She hated that. “The Kingspire today is the temple of the goddess first. Tomorrow, it will be the seat of the empire again.”

“I believe I can find my way,” she said, and walked away briskly before anyone could stop her. She was weeping again, and bitterly. The humiliation had flanked her, and now the full edifice of her composure was crumbling. She marched toward one of the smaller buildings whose use she neither knew nor cared. She prayed that Vincen would not follow her. Or that he would. She turned and found herself in a stables. A dozen horses stood calmly in their stalls, considering her with huge, soft eyes as she sat on a wooden stool and quietly cursed.

It was his voice. It was the spiders in Vicarian’s voice. The power they held to make anything seem plausible, to seem true. He’d as much as called her a foolish old slut, and she couldn’t help but believe it. It was his curse and his magic, the venom of dragons still deadly after thousands of years.

“It isn’t true,” she said. “It isn’t true.” Except that maybe it was. Some part of her had already thought or feared to think everything he’d said. That the spiders had said it didn’t mean it wasn’t also true. In the distance, she heard voices fading in the direction of the Kingspire. She had to get up. She had to find Cithrin and the others, prepare herself for Geder’s return. She heard footsteps and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, ready to put a brave face on whatever indignity came next.

“Lady Kalliam? Are you all right?”

“Prince Aster,” she said. “I would say I’m well, but that might be overly simple.”

“I saw your son going to the tower, but no one knew where you were. I asked Basrahip, but he didn’t know. I was afraid that maybe…”

“All’s well,” she said, biting the words as she said them. “The plan is still intact.”

“It will be over soon,” Aster said, taking her hand, offering her comfort and perhaps asking some in return. “They’ll be dead and we can put it all right.”

She saw the shadow in the doorway even as the last words passed the prince’s lips. She thought for a moment it was another horse wandering loose, but of course it wasn’t.

Minister Basrahip was come to see if the prince had found her, if she was well, if there was anything he or his false goddess could offer. He stepped in among the animals as Aster finished speaking and stopped, as stunned as if he’d suffered a hammer blow. His huge eyes blinked, his mouth gaped, and then, as understanding blossomed in him, he flushed.

There could be no explaining their way free of this.

“Go,” she said, pushing Aster behind her. “Find Cithrin. Tell her.”

“But—”

“Go!” Clara shouted, and with that, Aster fled.

She stood before the priest, her hands at her sides but in fists. The priest’s gaze shifted from side to side, as though he was seeing more than only her. His jaw clenched until she could hear his teeth groan, and his voice was raw with anger. “What is this?”

It didn’t matter what she said now. There was no deceiving her way out from under it. So, then, she was ready to be damned for what she was. “There is no goddess,” Clara said, speaking each word clearly and sharply. “You have spent your life in service to a deceit.”

He roared, surging forward, and the world seemed to narrow to her body. The sounds all around her stuttered into silence, and she was on the ground, her face pressed against the hay and filth. Her cheek bled where he had struck her, but she felt it only as a rivulet of wetness, both warm and cool. In their stalls, the horses shied and kicked, frightened by the violence. She rose to her feet, but Basrahip was gone, running on tree-thick legs toward the Kingspire.

She neither thought nor hesitated, only lowered her head and ran. She was a woman, and older than the priest, but he had spent his winter sitting in a temple worshipping a lie while she’d marched through snowbound mountains, and she was half his weight. She had no doubt that she could catch him.

“Vincen!” she shouted as she ran. “Vincen! To me!”

To me, to me, and burn anyone who says otherwise. To me, damn it, before he gets away.

Basrahip reached the tower before her, pushing open one of the servants’ doors. Behind her, a welcome voice called her. “My lady!”

“Stop him, Vincen,” she shouted, and ran on. Her knees hurt, her feet hurt, a sharp pain stung her back, and she felt none of it. There was only the chase. The perfect focus on the bastard huffing his way along before her, and the desperate need to stop him.

The Kingspire was a maze to her. Halls and corridors, stairways and servants’ passages. If she lost sight of him, he would be lost. Everything would be lost. She spared nothing, and Vincen Coe, his sword drawn, ran at her side.

They found him before a wide, sweeping stair. She threw herself at his legs to slow him as Vincen looped around to block his way. The huntsman’s blade shone in the light. Basrahip lowered his wide head, shook it like a man recovering from a blow.

“You think,” Basrahip said, “to cut me?”

“This far,” Vincen said. “No farther.”

Basrahip laughed. “Would you draw my blood? You wish to feel the goddess’s kiss? I can do this for you.”

Clara cried out, crawling away from him. With the sprint done, her lungs felt in flame. Her heart might burst at any second. Vincen moved forward, putting himself between her and the priest.

“You end where you are,” Vincen said.

“I continue forever,” Basrahip said, and Clara knew it was truth. He wasn’t a priest, nor even a man. All unknowing, he was the voice of dragons. Of war and death and violence that bred violence that bred violence, in a fire that burned on bodies from the dawn of time to the death of everything. “You have already lost. Listen to my voice. You dare not hurt me. You and your filthy sword. Everything you love is already lost. Everything you hope for is already gone. You cannot win.”

The words burst against her like storm waves. Jorey would die on the field, cut down by Timzinae blades. Sabiha, Annalise, Lady Skestinin. All would die. Vicarian was gone. Dawson was gone. And if Vincen turned his blade, if he drew the enemy’s blood, the spiders in it would come for them as well.

“No,” she said. “You have to let him go.”

“You have already lost,” Basrahip said. “You cannot win. You will never win.”

Vincen’s blade shifted, its point drifting down as a terrible comprehension filled his eyes. Tears of horror streaked his face. Basrahip stepped forward and took the sword from Vincen’s hand.

“You cannot win,” Basrahip said, and pushed Vincen to the ground. She crawled to him, took his hands in hers as behind them the great priest mounted the stairs, his fist making Vincen’s blade seem a table knife. “Everything you have is already gone.”

It was the spiders, she thought. It was only their power; there was still hope. But her heart knew otherwise.

They’d lost.

Marcus

Marcus’s left foot hurt. A mild ache down in the joints at the ball of his large toe. He tried to stretch it as he walked the three-sided dueling yard, leaning back a little into each step. It didn’t seem to be helping. The sword strapped across his back chafed, and he was getting an annoying little twitch near his eye. Likely he wouldn’t have noticed any of it, except that he was tense as if he were leading a full army into the field, with nothing that he could do but pace and wait to light the signal torch.

He’d planned it out with Yardem. If Inys came too early, the priests wouldn’t be gathered in their sacrificial temple. Too long, and they’d have noticed they were trapped and devised an escape. As soon as Geder and Yardem reemerged, Geder could call in his guard, put them in place. Be ready when the dragon came. Any of them that jumped, he’d be at the bottom with the sword to kill whatever spiders splashed out of the corpses.

Only being anxious tempted him to move too fast, so while the thing he wanted most in life was to take the little torch from beside the wide iron brazier they’d set out on the gravel of the yard and push it into the lump of sage and pitch, he waited instead, cataloging the ways his body hurt and watching the shadows shift with the sun. He looked toward the Kingspire, waiting for Yardem and the Lord Regent. They weren’t there.

The buildings around the base of the Kingspire felt empty as a burned city. The pathways seemed to miss the servants and courtiers that normally walked them. The windows stood shuttered against the summer sun. Geder’s private guard manned the streets at the edges of the grounds, keeping any attacker, the story was, from interrupting the priestly conclave. He had to think their eyes were as much on the tower as the streets. The goddess was the center of the empire, after all. The enemy was nearly at the gates. He’d been in enough cities facing attack to know how deeply a people consumed by fear could long for the miraculous—a cunning man’s vision of victory, a child’s imagined portent, anything that promised a future that could be known. Geder and his priests had spent so much effort pruning away everyone in the city who didn’t have faith, the ones who remained had to be certain that this was the moment that would save them.

And maybe it was, but it would be an ugly surprise for them all the same. If their salvation came today, it would be dressed like defeat. He squinted up into the sky, tested the air with his upstretched palm, and wondered again how long the dragon would take to arrive. I will come had sounded near to immediate when Inys had said it, but even the thickest smoke needed the wind to carry it. Flying might be faster than the swiftest horse, but it still took time. Why wasn’t Yardem back yet? This was all taking too long. Or he was more impatient than he thought? Marcus stretched his foot again. It ached.

When Inys came, there would be a moment when he was just in front of the great opened doors of the temple, bathing the enemy in flame. The eyes of Camnipol would all be on him, including the harpoons and lines that would encumber him and bring him down so Geder and his guard could end both threats to humanity in a single day. Marcus made it an even bet that the little bastard would be hailed and remembered as a hero for it. The world wasn’t fair that way, but so long as the dragons’ war was well and truly ended, Marcus didn’t care. That everyone who deserved credit claimed it and blame stuck where it belonged was too much to ask for. Winning would have to be enough. If Yardem would just get back.

Aster came running down the path, head down, arms and legs pumping. Cithrin sprinted just behind. All of Marcus’s aches and complaints were forgotten. His mouth went dry. He took two steps toward them, looked toward the torch, the tower.

“Basrahip knows,” Aster gasped. “He heard me. He heard Lady Kalliam. He knows.”

“All right,” Marcus said, his voice calm despite the copper taste in his mouth. Cithrin came, her lungs working like a bellows. The distress in her eyes said more than words. If he left the torch, Cithrin could light it, provided Yardem came back down. Or Geder. Or him. Or anyone. He squinted up at the tower, and past it to the sky. No great wings marked the blue. There wasn’t time. In two long strides, he reached the torch and tossed the living flame into the brazier. The dry sage spat and the stink of burning pitch billowed up and out into the wide and empty air.

“Marcus,” Cithrin said. The word carried more questions than he had time to answer.

“Rally the guard,” he said. “If I don’t come back, finish the job.”

“But—” she cried, and he was already running. The Kingspire had a dozen ways in at the base, but only one direction: up. The great priest would try to stop Geder and Yardem, and that meant climbing the endless flights of stairs. Marcus moved through the empty hall, ignoring the wide and airy archways, the statues of thousands of years, the tapestries and censers and images of worked gold. For him, there was only the hunt.

He took the stairs two at a time, reaching back as he did and tugging the wrapping away from the blade. They were past all disguises now. His footsteps echoed. Far away to his left, he heard something like a woman’s wail, but he didn’t have time or attention to spend on it. He didn’t know where the priest was, how far the man had gotten, how much of a head start he’d had. It didn’t change anything. The worst that would happen was Basrahip would reach the temple, sound the alarm, and Marcus would have to hold as many of the priests from coming down as he could before they slaughtered him or the dragon came. He felt himself grinning with the effort of the run. Or maybe it was just grinning.

As the tower rose, the walls sloped gently in, each level a bit smaller than the one below, the rooms and corridors a bit less grand, the stairs to the next level up narrower and fewer. The nearer they got to the temple, the more the tower itself would push them toward each other. He’d known a butcher once, and had the sense that slaughterhouses worked in much the same way.

The priest knew the path, and Marcus was finding it as he went. The priest had a head start. The urge to sprint, to push himself up as fast as he could go, tempted him. The sense that the enemy was just beyond his reach, and that if he pushed himself a little harder, he might catch him in time, sang in his blood. Instead, he kept to a brisk, steady pace. He focused on the architecture, finding his way through the halls and corridors like it was a deer path in the wood.

Outside, beyond his senses, the signal smoke was rising. The dragon was on his way. He couldn’t think about that. Just where was there more wear on the carpets, where had steadying hands left smudges along the wall. He couldn’t hurry. If he went too fast now, he’d exhaust himself. He’d fail. If he drew the sword—and he wanted badly to feel its weight in his hands—it would cost him speed and add to his fatigue. He found another curving stair, and went up. His footsteps echoed weirdly against the jade.

Only no, they didn’t. The sound he heard complicating his steps came from above. He paused, his hands stretching wide and then tightening into fists. Footsteps retreating above him. The feral grin stretched his lips wider, and Marcus let himself run. Up the flight to a hall with half a dozen corridors converging on it. The sound was louder here. There was labored breath as well. He was close. A narrow window looked out to the southwest, offering a view of the grounds, the gaol, the Division, the sprawling city. But not a dragon. Not yet. Marcus closed his eyes, listening. The footsteps and breathing grew a degree quieter as he turned slowly, but he found which of the hallways it came from. He ran again with the long loping stride of a scout and a soldier.

The chamber at the hallway’s end was low-ceilinged and wide. Carved wooden tables stood discreetly against the walls under portraits of kings long dead. A thin white carpet covered the floor like fallen paper, and the spill of light from the shuttered window drew bright lines across it. The priest labored his way across it toward a half-open door and a fresh flight of stairs.

“Hey!” Marcus shouted as he drew the poisoned sword.

The priest turned. He was a large, broad man with flushed face and rage in his eyes. Marcus had known others like him, naturally strong even if he didn’t train. It wasn’t the only hint of Yemmu blood in the man’s history. The shape of his jaw had a bit of it too. Marcus drew the poisoned sword, holding it in a double-handed grip. He saw Basrahip understand what it was, and what it meant.

The priest held a bright steel blade in his right fist like it was a stick. Not much technique, Marcus guessed, but plenty enough power. In case it was easy, Marcus lunged, his blade cutting fast and low.

The priest parried him. A little technique, then. That was a shame.

The priest’s breath was fast and hard. It might have been the exertion of the run or mind-blanking rage. Basrahip bared his teeth and shouted in wordless, animal aggression. Marcus took an involuntary step back. Even absent meaning, the sound of his voice held power. The gift Morade had given him and his kind along with their world-killing madness.

Basrahip swung his own blade in a short, hard arc. Marcus danced back, and the priest surged forward, shouting again. The poisoned sword stank with fumes that left a foul taste in Marcus’s mouth, but the priest ignored that, striking out artlessly with his own steel blade. Marcus parried and countered. Basrahip pushed the attack aside like he was clearing weeds. Marcus felt the impact of blade against blade in his wrists and shoulders.

“Strong bastard, aren’t you?” he said. “How’s your stamina?”

For that, he thought, how’s mine? But the priest was hammering at him again, the raw fury of the attack driving Marcus slowly back. The shuttered windows was behind him. If this went on too long, he’d be driven against it. Marcus imagined himself being tossed out, spinning head over feet to the path below. It would be a stupid way to die.

The priest used the moment’s distraction. His vast howl came again, and the blade with it. Marcus shifted away, but the tip of the priest’s sword touched his arm as it passed. The pain was bright. Blood pattered against the perfect white of the floor and Marcus drew himself into a guard position and countered, driving the priest back toward the stairway. The injured arm felt numb, but it wasn’t weaker. Or not much so. As far as he could tell. There was a lot of blood, but no muscle cut through. He only needed one solid hit, and the venom would do the rest. If it meant letting Basrahip open his guts for him, it wouldn’t matter. The priest would still be dead. He wouldn’t raise the alarm. Where the hell were Yardem and Geder anyway?

The priest’s laughter began as a deep sound, like someone chopping wood, and grew.

“Something… funny?” Marcus gasped out.

“Cannot,” the priest said. “Cannot win. You cannot win.”

In Marcus’s belly, something gave way. Not fear, not despair—not yet—but the awareness of how he was vulnerable. He struck forward, pushing the priest, but Basrahip was laughing now, even as he avoided the envenomed blade.

“You have already lost,” the priest said. “Listen to my voice. Everything you love is already gone. You cannot win.”

“Heard that before,” he said, as if defiance would rob the man’s voice of the dragon’s power.

“There is no reason to go on.”

Marcus tried to pull his attention away from the words. Tried to focus on the weight of the blade in his hand, the stance of his opponent. The brightening pain in his arm, the sound of his blood pattering onto the floor like raindrops. But the words pressed through it all, taking him by the throat.

“You have lost,” Basrahip said, and even as he knew the trick of it, Marcus felt the deep, familiar darkness rising up from his mind to meet the man’s voice. “You cannot win. Everything you love is already gone. Listen to my voice. You cannot win.”

For a heartbeat—no more—he was holding Merian’s body against his. The smell of fire and death filling his nostrils, the fumes rising up from her corpse and changing who he was forever. Merian. Alys. His wife and his child, dead because he’d been loyal to the wrong man. Cithrin was already the same. Already doomed because he hadn’t been strong enough or wise enough to turn her from the path she’d chosen. Yardem was as good as dead. Kit and the players. Because he hadn’t done better.

“You cannot win. You have already lost. Everything you fight for, everything you care for, all of it is already gone. Your failure cannot be changed. You have lost!”

The priest’s voice rang out in the narrow space, and Marcus felt the poisoned sword growing heavier. It sank lower, dropping out of defensive stance. Tears familiar as old enemies filled his eyes, and his chest ached with every failure he’d dragged behind him all through the wide, empty world. The priest stepped closer, as Marcus had known he would. Basrahip’s blade was stained at the tip, red with Marcus’s blood.

“You can never win. You have lost everything. Everything and forever.”

The vast and familiar ocean of sorrow in Marcus’s chest opened, blooming out endlessly. Other people healed, other people mourned and moved on. But he would feel the pain fresh every time, every moment without Merian and Alys would be as bright with grief as the first one. And nothing could ever undo it. The priest took another step nearer. His eyes were bright and certain. The blade in his vast hand was ready. Marcus blinked away a thick tear.

“Listen to my voice,” Basrahip said. “You cannot win. You have lost, now and always. Everything you love is lost to you. Everything you do is doomed. Empty. Meaningless.”

“Old news,” Marcus said, and sank the poisoned sword into Basrahip’s gut.

The priest’s eyes narrowed in what looked like confusion as he stepped back. Dark, thick blood poured out of his belly onto the pale floor. Spiders ran a few skittering inches from where they fell, tracking pinpoints of inky blood behind them, then stilled and died. Basrahip put a hand to the wound, astonished and confused. Already a thick white foam was forming where the blade had broken the big man’s skin. A smell like heated wine and fresh shit filled the room, but Marcus didn’t gag. Basrahip’s breath stuttered and became harder, gasping.

“What have you done?” he demanded through clenched teeth.

Marcus shrugged and nodded toward the flowing, spider-clotted blood. “The job.”

His own arm was slick with his brighter blood, and the pain from it was getting worse. He stepped back, waiting for the priest to fall. Instead Basrahip’s eyes filled with rage, and he bulled forward, swinging his sword before him like a farmer’s child at his first reaping. Marcus moved back, his center low, the two-handed blade shifting to turn every blow. The priest was strong, but with each breath, his attacks grew weaker. Less precise.

Something was happening under the priest’s skin; a dark mottling covered his hands, his neck, his wide face. His eyes lost their focus on Marcus, found him for a moment, then wandered again.

Slowly, Basrahip sank to his knees, trembling, but he did not drop his blade. The blood on his belly was so dark now, it looked black, and the spiders that fell from the wound were dead before they found the floor. Marcus watched, unmoved and unmoving, as the last vestiges of life left Basrahip and his empty body slumped to the side. Marcus drove the poisoned sword through the stilled chest, leaning until the blade came through the dead man’s back, just to be sure it was done. He didn’t intend to sit so much as he simply found himself, legs crossed, on the floor. The fresh red blood from his arm pooled around him, mixing with the darker spatters, and it occurred to him for the first time that the injury he’d taken in the fight might be more serious than he’d thought.

He should bind it. Slowly, like a man half-asleep, he pulled his belt from around his waist and cinched it around his arm above the wound. He felt borne up on a soft relief. It was done. He’d stopped the priest. He was done. It was over. He realized he’d closed his eyes when he opened them. The poisoned sword rose from the corpse like a flagpole. Or the marker for a grave. He’d carried the damned thing so long, and at such cost. It was good he’d gotten some use from it.

He needed to get up. Find Yardem. Warn him. The dragon was coming, or had already come. Marcus opened his eyes again and had to concentrate to keep from closing them. He wanted to rest, wanted to let sleep take him, and maybe something deeper than sleep. Basrahip’s empty face was turned toward him, still as stone. The stench from him was awful, but Marcus didn’t mind it. Death shouldn’t be pretty. It shouldn’t be dignified. Better that it come ugly and brutal and true. If you could love it then, you’d be sure you were ready.

He closed his eyes, and waited for Merian to come. For Alys to take his hand. For all the shit and sorrow of decades to go away forever. When none of that happened, he sighed and levered himself up to his feet.

Some other day, then.

“Yardem!” he shouted. “Are you still here?”

Geder

I’ll be waiting when you come back,” Cithrin said.

Geder’s heart ached at her fragility and her strength. What he wanted was to take her in his arms and swear he’d protect her and that she’d never want for anything again. Instead he looked at her, his expression serious, and promised the next best thing. “We will return.” It meant a hundred things more than the words themselves. He hoped she understood. He turned to the Tralgu guard. Yardem, his name was. “We’d best get started. It can be a long way up.”

The guard smiled vaguely, and Cithrin said, “Thank you, Yardem.”

Geder turned, and they walked toward the Kingspire. Geder felt her eyes on him, or imagined that he did. He held himself a little taller in case he was right. When they stepped through the main doors of the Kingspire, Geder hesitated. Something felt wrong. Then he realized it was only that the great tower was quiet where usually it echoed and rumbled with the voices of servants and slaves and the business of the crown.

“Prince Geder!”

Basrahip lumbered toward him from the shadows. Geder’s smile went still. The great priest wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be up in the temple. Cithrin bel Sarcour wasn’t fifty feet behind him, and here was Basrahip looking at him. It was oddly thrilling. Which one of us is the dupe now? “Basrahip.”

“We have all come to your call,” Basrahip said, hunching forward in unconscious deference. “The last of us are making their way up to the temple even now.”

“Just going there myself,” Geder said. Because it was true. He had to be careful to say only things that were true. Things were going well, but they were still on a knife’s edge.

“I will join you in a moment,” Basrahip said, and looked back over his shoulder.

“Is there anything wrong?” Geder asked.

“The Lady Kalliam said she wished to refresh herself and that she would be well, but…” He shook his great head.

You can deal with it when you come back, Geder almost said, then stopped himself. Basrahip couldn’t deal with it when he came back because he would never be coming back, and Geder knew it. No lies. He could mislead, but he couldn’t lie. He’d almost given the game away, and the nearness of the mistake chilled him. “All right, but don’t take long. I really, really want you up there.”

Basrahip’s smile was broad and grateful. “I shall be there in a moment, Prince Geder. I long to hear the voice of the goddess in yours.”

Do you? Geder thought. Well, don’t wait underwater.

Basrahip turned and lumbered off. Geder made for the stairs, the Tralgu guard at his side.

“That going to be a problem?” the guard asked.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Geder said.

What’s taking him so long?”

The temple hadn’t been made as a temple. Geder had had it dedicated to the spider goddess, the Righteous Servant, after Dawson Kalliam turned Camnipol into a battlefield. There was a large room with an open window almost as wide as the wall itself that looked out over the city and past it to the haze of land in the south. Ropes as thick as Geder’s arm held the great red banner draping down from here. Far below, the tops of the trees shifted in the wind, their soft green billows echoing the shapes of the white clouds above.

Beyond the main room, the temple was only corridors and rooms that had been pressed into the goddess’s service. Cells for the priests to pray in, an altar where they carried out their rites. A pantry somewhere that servants stocked with bread and soup and wine. A privacy closet that they cleaned five times in the day. Old sconces with the black soot halos that marked where generations of torches had guttered and burned. Iron rings in the walls and ceilings whose use Geder could only guess at. The stones were older than the empire, and generations of footsteps had worn the floors smoother than glass. There was a beauty to the rooms, and a sense of age and dignity.

Geder scratched his arm and glanced back at the great doors. The ones that led to the stairway that they would escape down. The doors he and Yardem would bar and block just as soon as Basrahip arrived.

If he would only come.

“Might be a problem for another day,” the Tralgu man said.

“No. No, he has to be here,” Geder said.

Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “Any reason?”

Because he was the one who lied to me, Geder thought but didn’t say. He was the one who made me look like a fool. “He just does.”

The rooms of the temple were loud with the rush and crash of priestly voices. The air stank of incense and bodies. Geder hadn’t known really just how many priests there were. Between all the cities of the empire and the men still tending the original temple in the mountains east of the Keshet, hundreds had come. Most Firstblood, but at least one Jasuru and what looked to be a handful of Cinnae men, pale and reed-thin. He didn’t know when they had been brought into the fold. Tainted by the spiders.

The priests walked through the rooms of the temple, segregating themselves into groups that eyed one another warily. There were so many, it was hard to see where one group ended and the next began. The divisions were there, though, marked out in the motion of bodies and the suspicious glances.

The group standing nearest the great doors were all Antean, inducted into the temple in the last years. Jorey’s brother was among them, talking and laughing. They were too near the doors. What if they stepped out? What if they found the bars that were going to turn the temple first into a prison, and then into a kiln? How would he explain that?

“Don’t,” Yardem said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stare at the door. They’re watching us.”

Of course they were. Geder was their savior, after all. The man who had called them all into the reach of his living voice to reconcile all their differences and schisms. To end forever the wars between them. And he would, he would, but Basrahip needed to be there. He turned away, looking out over the city without seeing it. His chest felt tight, and between the heat of the room and the smell of it, little waves of nausea were starting to crawl up the back of his throat. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. This was his moment of vengeance, and all he wanted was for it to be over.

So many things in his life had been like that. Everything he’d expected, everything that was supposed to be good and wonderful, had actually been sour and sad. He’d ridden off to war expecting camaraderie and friendship, but except for Jorey, he’d been the butt of jokes and pranks. He’d been protector of Vanai, but only because he’d been set up to fail. He’d had a triumph thrown in his name, been given the regency, and none of it had brought the satisfaction he’d expected. None of it had carried any lasting joy.

Well, that wasn’t fair. There had been moments. His time with Cithrin and Aster in the ruins, of course. But others as well. Undermining Alan Klin had been a pleasure, and that had been before he’d met Basrahip and everything had been tainted. That one time, when Klin had sent him into the winter mud of the Free Cities hunting for the fleeing wealth of Vanai, he’d actually found it, made his own little fortune, and let the smugglers go rather than hand Klin the glory. The memory of the chest filled with gems and jewelry, half-sunken in ice and snow, of pouring double handfuls of the treasure down his shirt before anyone could see him, filled him with a soft, nostalgic glow. Of all he had done in all his life, there had been a good moment.

Something plucked at the back of his mind. The smugglers had been in a caravan guarded by some famed mercenary captain. He couldn’t remember the name. But…

“Were you ever in Vanai?” he asked.

Yardem answered with a noise deep in his throat. He put a hand on Geder’s shoulder.

“Now,” he said.

“Now? What now?”

“We have to do the thing now.”

“We can’t,” Geder said. “Basrahip—”

“The signal torch is burning,” Yardem said.

For a moment, it was as if the words were in some unknown language. He couldn’t make sense of them. Then, slowly, the air left him. He looked down toward the dueling yard. The iron brazier there glimmered like a star in the night sky. A thin cloud of smoke billowed up from it. Geder’s chest tightened more. He couldn’t breathe.

“No,” he said. “No, that’s just the sunlight. That’s just a reflection of the… of the…”

Yardem steadied him with a wide, strong hand. His voice was low and conversational. Nothing in his tone suggested that their lives were suddenly at risk. “We’ll be all right. But we have to go now.”

“We have to go now,” Geder echoed.

He gathered himself to walk, but his limbs suddenly felt as if they were made from wood. He’d become a puppet with an impatient child yanking at his strings. He forced his mouth into a smile that felt grotesque and false. The urge to run pricked him, and he had to pretend he didn’t feel it. Yardem padded calmly at his side, as if the distance from the great open windows to the door at the temple’s far end weren’t the difference between life and death. Geder tried to match the Tralgu’s stride.

The priests turned to watch him. Of course they did. That didn’t mean anything. He’d called them here. He hadn’t explained what he was doing. They were curious. Of course their attention was on him. It wasn’t because they knew.

The doors seemed to come closer, even through it was really him moving toward them. A wire-haired priest in a black robe with a belt of chain nodded to Geder. He nodded back, but didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. They were thick doors. Hard to break through. Now he wasn’t sure of that. There were so many priests, after all. But the dragon was coming. All they needed to do was pass through the room, close the doors. There were iron bars waiting there in the shadows. He’d hold the doors closed while Yardem fit the metal across the brackets, and then they’d run. Geder could already imagine himself running down the stair so fast it felt like falling.

His heart stopped. What if they met Basrahip on their way down? How would he explain what was happening?

“We can’t,” he whispered, hoping the priests weren’t close enough to hear.

“Going to have to, my lord,” Yardem said.

The doors came closer, and Geder’s heart beat again, harder now for having lost its rhythm. It fought against his ribs like a panicked bird killing itself against the bars of its cage. He couldn’t quite believe the priests didn’t hear it. His own ears were roaring with his pulse. A dozen more steps to the doors, then the stairs…

“Remembered something important, Lord Regent?” Vicarian Kalliam asked, his voice light as a joke.

Geder nodded, acknowledging him without answering. He couldn’t answer.

“Prince Geder?” another priest said. “You look unwell. Are you leaving us?”

“I—” Geder said, and stopped.

The room was silent now. All the priests—there were hundreds of them—had shifted to face him. There were too many. He couldn’t fight his way free. He had to say something. He had to tell them everything was all right, but it wasn’t, and they’d know. He had to tell them he wasn’t leaving, but he was leaving, and they’d know. He had to lie, because if they knew the truth, they’d rip him to shreds with their hands and spill out into the world again, and Cithrin would know he’d failed. And Aster. Only he couldn’t lie.

There had to be a way. A turn of phrase and intention that would get him free, but he couldn’t think of anything. The seconds stretched, and fear with them.

He looked up into the Tralgu’s warm, dark eyes. We’re going to die here, Geder thought. I’ve done all this, come all this way, and I’m going to die here because someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer. The monstrous unfairness of it was like a torch in his belly. It hurt and it filled his nose with the scent of smoke. The anger flowed into him, an old ally come in his hour of need.

He had to say something.

It had to be true.

Fine.

“No,” Geder said. “I’m not leaving.”

The Tralgu blinked, but if there was any surprise in his expression, Geder couldn’t see it.

“I’m not leaving,” Geder said, his voice ringing out. “Hear my voice? I’m not… I’m not leaving.”

Because if I were, you bastards would know it. And if you knew, it would all be over. And I’m not losing to you again.

Yardem nodded. “I’ll let her know.”

The sense of loss was less terrible than he’d thought it would be. It wasn’t even grief, precisely. Only a profound disappointment. There were going to be days and nights in Cithrin’s company. He was going to read poetry to her, and watch Aster become king. He was going to go out to Rivenhalm with his father and spend a long day fishing at his side, the way he’d always meant to. He’d see Sabiha and tell her himself how Cithrin bel Sarcour had come and saved the empire with him, and everything was going to be all right. Only no. He wouldn’t. He was going to do this instead.

“Yes. Please tell her,” Geder said. “Tell them all.”

Then he stood silently and watched while the Tralgu walked out the doors and closed them solidly behind him. Briefly, something in Geder’s mind shrieked. This is the moment. Change your mind again. Run! But then the low growl of the iron bars came, and all hope died.

He looked around at the men staring at him. Dozens of different faces. Some were confused, some sullen and angry, some lit with hope. He smiled. It felt real this time. It was as if everything he’d ever seen had been through a dirty window, and now the glass was clean.

He was done. Nothing mattered.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “All right. Why don’t we get started? Can all of you come here, please? Everyone from the back rooms too? Yes, good. Everybody. Come out here where you can get a good look out at the city.”

Like a nurse with too many children to care for, Geder made a show of putting them all in lines and rows. They shuffled and pushed under his guidance, jockeying for position without knowing it was their own pyre. Geder found a bleak and terrible joy in it all. Here, you’re taller, so stand at the back. Make sure everyone’s got a good view. This is important. This will be amazing. You’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t you? I can tell.

They stood in ranks, facing the open sky, and Geder took his place behind them. Their heads blocked the blue. It was fine. There, almost too small to see, but high in the open air, something was gliding. A hawk above the city walls, perhaps. Or something larger and farther away, but coming close.

“All right,” Geder said, his voice a cheerful singsong. “I want everyone to close their eyes. Everybody, now. You’ve come all this way to hear what I have learned about the goddess. So close your eyes, and relax. I want you all to feel her power within you. I want you to feel the comfort she gives you all. Can you do that for me?”

A murmur of gentle assent rose all around him.

“Think about all that you have sacrificed for her,” Geder said. The wings were larger than a hawk’s now, but not yet, he guessed, within the city. With every heartbeat, they seemed to grow just a bit wider, just a bit thicker. Like someone had drawn a pen across the clouds, and the ink was still seeping in. “Think about the trust you have put in her. The faith. You have all given your lives for her. Died out of the life you had before in order to carry her voice into the world. Without your dedication to her, you might have had wives. Children. You might have written songs or brewed beer or any of a thousand different things, but you are the servants of the Servant because you knew in your heart that this was better. Am I right? Do you deny it?”

Another wave of voices, now in negation. No, they did not deny. No one could deny the power of her voice. Some of them were swaying now. Someone was weeping, and it sounded like joy. The wings were no longer like a hawk’s. They took a shape more like a vast and ragged bat. Not quite that, but more like. It was a beautiful creature. He could make out the dragon’s head now, and it might have been only his imagination, but he thought he heard a roar rising in the city. A thousand throats shouting in a chorus of fear.

“Think of the promises she made you,” Geder said. “The golden glow of truth. The knowledge that you were better and purer and more right than everyone else. Take a moment, and feel all the love in that promise. Take comfort in it.”

Someone in the group moaned in something like religious ecstasy. Geder bounced on the balls of his feet. His grin was so wide, it ached.

“My voice doesn’t have that power. But it can carry truth. And the truth I have for you—the one you have been waiting for and searching for, the one that will end all dispute between you, has come. Take a breath, open your eyes, and hear my truth. You don’t get to fucking laugh at me.”

One opened his eyes, then a handful, and then all of them together. They looked around in confusion, reared back, cried out. They surged for the doors, but to no effect. The iron held. The dragon’s approach shrugged off the illusion of floating gentleness. It drove toward them all like a falling stone. The great mouth opened, and Geder could see its teeth.

Inys slammed into the tower, his vast head blotting out the city, the sky, the future.

For the first few seconds, the flames felt cold.

Cithrin

Inys hit the Kingspire with a sound louder than thunder. Cithrin felt it in her chest like a blow. Massive claws dung deep into the tower’s flanks, leaving marks so wide she could see them from the gardens where she stood. His body filled like a bellows, and the roar of the fire was an assault in itself. Flames blew out, bathing the dragon’s head. They lit the windows of the Kingspire. Black smoke billowed up, rising into the sky. An announcement of tragedy. The violence of it staggered her.

Aster, unthinking, pushed himself in front of her as if his body would offer any protection. She put her hand on his shoulder. All around the grounds, the others were gaping up at the spectacle. Other voices raised in alarm came from behind her. Geder’s guards. The city watch. All the men and soldiers that Geder was supposed to have summoned making their own approach, alarmed and unsought. She didn’t know if this was a blessing, and she didn’t turn to see. The banner of the goddess fell toward them, but slowly. It burned as it fell, and seemed borne up by the heat of its own unmaking. It rained ashes below it and belched smoke above.

The dragon drew another vast breath, and the fire came again. A cracking sound, sharp as a board snapped across a knee, but a thousand times louder, came from the Kingspire.

She wanted to call out to Marcus, to Yardem. To anyone. But there was only her and the prince, and the actors who were the nearest thing to her family. The dying tower at the heart of a dying empire. The terrible grandeur was more than she’d expected. Marcus, Yardem, Geder… they’d been meant to escape the tower first. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Either the ground was shaking or she was. She couldn’t tell which.

The banner reached the trees, draping over the broad and leafy branches. New smoke rose up. New flames to echo the ones still glowing in the tower.

We have to get water, she thought. We have to put the fires out before they spread. It wasn’t enough to spur her into motion.

The horror and awe that consumed her shifted, and a new thought slid brightly into her mind. This was it. This was the moment she’d aimed herself toward. If they’d been in the temple, the spiders were gone now. The war that had spanned all human history was rising in the smoke above her. She wanted to see it as a victory, but she couldn’t see it as anything but an act of breathtaking destruction. That peace could come from this was an article of faith. A thing she believed because she had to.

Someone called her name, the voice almost drowned out by the sound of the flames. It took her a timeless moment to find him: Sandr waving his hands and pointing at the mechanism beside him. Cithrin shook her head, confused. The actor yelled something and pointed up, at Inys. The serpentine tail wrapped the tower.

Oh. He was asking whether they should loose the bolts and try to pull the dragon down. She turned to find Marcus, only he wasn’t there. She’d known that.

They should wait. They could deal with Inys another time, when Marcus was back. If he came back.

If you fall, I’m picking up your damned blade myself.

Humanity had driven the spiders to the edge of the world once. But it had also thrown off the yoke of the dragons. Defeating one without the other now would only be half the job. If it meant betraying Inys, it was also being true to Marcus. And the royal guard was coming near.

“Do it!” she shouted over the roar and cacophony. “Bring him down!”

Sandr nodded and turned back to his mechanism. From all around the garden, splinters of bright metal arched up toward the dragon’s glittering scales, trailing gossamer. When the first two hit, Inys shifted, swiveling his massive head in confusion. Clinging as he was to the side of the burning tower, he didn’t have the freedom of movement he might have. It was why Marcus had chosen this moment.

Inys ripped out one of the barbs as two more hit. The gossamer on the first looked like it was growing thicker as thread drew up string to draw up rope, to pull Inys down. Geder’s guards rushed past her as if she weren’t there, bows drawn. More shouts came from behind them. Camnipol rising in terror and rage, as Marcus had hoped and intended.

Inys ripped another barb free, shifted his head toward them, and opened his mouth, but the gout of fire that came from him wasn’t strong enough to reach the ground. For the space of a heartbeat, the lines burned and turned to ash. Embers in the shape of spider web, crumbling, and then gone. The dragon’s roar was louder than the fire had been. His face, even from so far away, was perfectly readable—confusion and pain, followed by a vast indignance.

More people rushed forward to the gardens. Not only guards now, but the servants Geder had ordered back. Some brandished swords and bows, but others rakes and horsewhips, stones plucked off the garden’s paths, or only raised voices and balled fists. For a moment, she loved them all. Aster pressed himself closer to her, but whether to protect her or be protected, she couldn’t say.

There was a strange nobility about it. All these people, faced with catastrophe, and running toward it. Any one of them would have been wiser to turn and flee, but instead they came together. By instinct, they would do together what none of them might have managed alone.

Inys rose, leaping up into the wide sky, his wings beating the air. The wind blew the fires brighter, and the dragon rose high above the reach of their weapons, spiraling up toward the clouds and then diving back down. Screams filled the air, and bows were drawn, ready to meet the attack. But Inys pulled out, swooping around to hit the highest point in the tower with all his weight. The burning Kingspire shook.

“It’s coming down!” Cithrin shouted. “Get out of the way! He’s pushing it down!”

Fire and stone fell together, coming faster than the banner had. It was only the highest part of the great tower that tipped over and tumbled down toward them, but it was still larger than her countinghouse in Porte Oliva had been. It hit the ground, spewing fire and dust. The screaming hadn’t stopped, but it had changed its character. No longer defiance and horror, but pain.

The dragon, hovering in the high air above the city, screamed. Cithrin thought there were words in it, but she couldn’t tell what they were. Inys spread his ragged wings and flew away to the south, far beyond their reach. They hadn’t brought him down. He’d gotten away.

“Well,” she said, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else, “that could have gone better.”

The royal quarter looked like a city after a sack. Stone and ancient wood burned hotter than a forge, scattered across the gardens in heaps taller than buildings. The people of Camnipol, guards and servants, divided themselves among fighting back the flame, tending to the wounded, and staring in open horror at the destruction. Cithrin found herself weeping with them, and didn’t know how many of her tears were sorrow, how many fear, how many relief.

Clara Kalliam stumbled forward out of the haze of dust and smoke, her huntsman close behind her. She came to Cithrin, and for a moment, each tried to find something to say. They fell into each other’s arms, embracing like mourners at a pyre. Cithrin felt other arms around her. Aster was with them, sobs wracking his body. And then Cary as well. And Kit. And Sandr, his hair singed and a thick burn over his right eye. And Charlit Soon whom Cithrin barely knew, holding her now like a sister in the wreckage. In the heart of the terror, they made a knot with each other, and the simple animal comfort of being held by others who shared her distress was the nearest thing Cithrin had ever felt to love.

“Is it done?” Clara asked. “Are they gone?”

“I think so,” Cithrin replied. “Probably?”

Cithrin felt the movement in the group, a shifting that filled her with dread before she understood it. Master Kit, his expression gentle, stood back. His hair was whiter now than it had been when she’d met him on the road from Vanai. The age in his face more pronounced. But the kindness and amusement and sorrow with which he embraced the world still glowed in his eyes.

“No,” he said. “There is one more.”

“Kit?” Cithrin said, struggling free of the others. Behind him, a vast structure within the rubble shifted, throwing out black smoke and embers like a thousand fireflies. Tears streaked Kit’s ash-powdered face.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “I have been thinking of this moment for some time.”

“No,” Cary said. “No no no.”

“Yes,” Kit said, lowering his head.

“You can’t,” Cary said. “We’ve just won. We did everything right. It isn’t fair.”

She took a step toward Kit. Her mouth was a slash of grief. Cithrin came to her side.

“It isn’t,” Kit said. “The world has never been fair. Often beautiful. Sometimes kind when kindness was not deserved. But never fair.”

“What are you thinking, Kit?” Cithrin said.

He stepped back, his arms rising at his sides as if he were only walking a stage, and the flames and devastation behind him were just a clever set piece.

“As long as I am in the world, the danger is as well. I am known to too many people, and the power I carry is too great. No, no, please. Don’t cry. This is victory too. I love you all. It has been an honor traveling with you.”

“Kit!” Cithrin shouted, but he was right. She felt it in her heart like a bruise too deep to touch.

The old actor turned his back to them and walked toward the fire, his steps steady and sure. His head held high and bravely. A dead man, choosing his own pyre.

Cary shrieked and surged forward. Sandr leaped for her, grabbing her shoulder and half spinning her. Cithrin took her arm, but the woman shrieked louder and fought. Clara came as well, and her huntsman, and even Aster. Cary lowered her head, pushing madly against them as the other actors came. It was a cruel parody of the embrace they’d just shared. Or else it was the same. Just the same.

When Cary’s knees gave way and she buckled, the others sank to the wounded grass with her. Cithrin’s world stank of fire and soil and dust and tears. When she looked up, Kit was gone among the flames. She closed her eyes again and looked away.

Time moved strangely for a while. The guards came, eyes wide, swords drawn against some enemy that they imagined they could cut. When none such appeared, they took position around Aster but then seemed not to know what they should do. Eventually, the boy prince ordered them to help contain the fires. A rose garden was in flame to their right. The rubble and debris from the Kingspire scattered like bones to the left, falling out over the edge and into the Division. If something caught flame down there, Cithrin didn’t know how they’d extinguish it, or if maybe it would find its place in the layer upon layer of ruins that were the earth under Camnipol, and set the whole city up like an endless torch. It didn’t matter.

As the fires moved, Aster joined the soldiers and servants in hunting through the wreckage for any who might still live. A sweep of well-tended grass became a makeshift cunning man’s tent, the wounded and the dying laid out in rows. There were more than Cithrin had hoped, but fewer than she’d feared. The cunning men moved through them, chanting and calling forth angels until the air seemed to bend from their petty magics.

She found Marcus on a gravel path by the edge of a burning pavilion. Blood caked his side, and his face was pale with its loss. It seemed almost certain that he would have collapsed without Yardem at his side, supporting him. The evil green blade in its scabbard was across Yardem’s back now. A soldier in the livery of House Caot stood before them, a naked blade in his hand.

“You can’t find an axe?” Marcus said.

“No,” the swordsman said. “This is all I have.”

“It’ll have to do. Get to the north side, up by that fountain. We need to clear all that brush. What you cut down, bring to the fire. Burn it where we can control the flames. Clearing the ground doesn’t do shit if you’re building up a pile of kindling on the far side of it.”

“Yes, sir,” the enemy soldier said, and sprinted away.

Marcus sagged, shaking his head.

“All their best men are in the field, sir,” Yardem said. Then, with a nod, “Magistra.”

She wanted to run to them, to fold her arms around them as she had with Clara, with Kit. But somehow, it felt wrong. That wasn’t who they were to each other. Or perhaps to themselves.

“Kit’s dead,” she said.

“How?” Marcus asked. She made her report—what Kit had said, holding Cary back as he walked into the flames—with a calm that sounded like shock even as she said it.

The pain that flickered across Marcus’s eyes was real, and more terrible for being so little expressed. “Sorry to hear that. Liked him. I’m fairly certain we got all the rest. I took the big one. Yardem locked the others in the tower before Inys came.”

“Inys escaped,” Cithrin said. “I… I tried.”

“You did fine. It’s the best plan I could find in the moment, but was long odds even before we started improvising.”

“Still…”

“You stopped the world from falling into an endless war of every man for himself,” Marcus said. “One asshole got past you. Still makes for a damned good record.”

“The asshole was a dragon.”

Marcus shrugged gingerly, flinching when the pain struck. “Didn’t call it perfect.”

“And Geder?” she asked.

Yardem flicked his ears and looked thoughtfully up at the ruined tower. “Dead, ma’am. He stayed behind so that the priests wouldn’t be alarmed. He wanted me to tell you.”

Cithrin frowned, waiting to see what emotions rose up in her. A bit of relief, a bit of confusion. “What did he want you to tell me?”

“That he died a hero, I think. That he sacrificed himself for your plan. For you.”

“Ah,” she said. “Not sure what to think of that.”

“We’ll put it on his tombstone,” Marcus said. “‘Here lies a vicious, petty tyrant who damn near broke the world. He did one brave thing at the end.’”

“It’s the thing he hoped to be remembered for,” Yardem said.

“I can hope for the clouds to rain silver,” Marcus said, “but it’s not going to happen.”

“No,” Cithrin agreed. “It isn’t.”

Her mind was already racing ahead. With Geder gone, the rest of the plan had to change as well, but possibly in ways that made things better. There wasn’t time for the Anteans to appoint a new Lord Regent. The city was wounded and under threat. The mark of their power was broken both in the city and in the world outside it. But there was a symmetry—the new saving the new—that might help sell what she needed sold now.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where are we going?” Marcus asked, already falling into half-carried step behind her.

“We need Aster.”

At the base of the Kingspire, the worst of the fire had exhausted itself. Here and there, great beams still burned like tree-thick logs in a Haaverkin common house. The tower stood smoking, its top jagged as a broken tooth. A severed monument to match the Severed Throne. The players were gone except for Mikel, Lak, and Sandr, who were moving with a group of the palace servants, carrying shovels to bury the little fires that still burned. Clara had been joined by several of the other women of the court, and was bringing water from some palace pump or well, not to stop the conflagration but to soothe the throats and clean the eyes and burns of those who did. Cithrin lifted an arm to her, and Clara nodded. She understood. It was time.

Aster stood amid the royal guard, staring up at the ruin that had been his home. Tear tracks marked his soot-dark face, but he was not weeping now. He only looked emptied. She couldn’t help wondering what this was like to him. So many years of believing all that Basrahip and the priests had said. She wasn’t sure even Kit’s words could have untied all of that knot. Would he still hate the Timzinae, even knowing that there was no call to? Would he still believe in a great spirit in the world that promised to slaughter all lies, when it had itself been proven false? Or would he reject everything, and live his life in the desolation that comes after betrayal? She didn’t know what to hope.

The guards closed rank to keep her from him, but Aster ordered them back. She walked to him. Her clothes were as filthy and smoke-stinking as his. Her body was shuddering with weariness. He smiled at her with a sorrow that belonged on a much older face.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“He is,” she said.

He lowered his head, mouth twisting for a moment in grief. “I thought so. He would have found me before this. If he could.”

“That’s true,” she said, because she believed that it was. “I’m so terribly sorry. About all of this. But I need you to come with me. With us. I need you to take Geder’s place.”

Aster shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was thin and lost. “I can’t.”

“You have to. This isn’t over,” she said. “And you may not be crowned yet, but you’re king.”

Entr’acte: The Dragon

Inys flew. The fallen, empty world passed beneath him like a bad dream from which he could never wake. His mind drifted as effortlessly as his body. He ached in both. Steel barbs still dug in his flesh, his blood sowing the fields he passed over. His wings were more torn and ragged. Even now, he carried the funereal scent of pitch and sage in his nostrils like a memory. There had been a poem he’d heard once about flames being the beginning and end of all things. He tried to remember it now, but it slipped away from him. And if he forgot it, it was gone forever.

The sun slid to the west and vanished. The forests below him turned to waves. Far beneath the sea he could follow the ghost lights of a great pod of the Drowned as they met for their slow council, even as they had done when they were a race new-made. He felt something at that. Not pleasure, but a nostalgia so steeped in longing as to grow poisonous. Near a great rocky island, he found an updraft and spiraled in it, rising up until the moon seemed as near as the ocean below him. The air grew thinner and colder until the draft could carry him no higher, and he only turned in a wide circle watching the moonlight play across his own outstretched wings. Silver against the black.

Marcus Stormcrow had betrayed him, but Inys bore no anger. Later, he might. Or he might not. There was no wisdom in blaming a flawed tool for shattering. His Stormcrow here was too feral. Untrained. If anything, the blame for the attack lay on Inys himself. He should have spent the time to better manage his slaves. So long as they valued their small, petty wills over his own, they would be dull knives for him, and he had a world to unmake and stitch back together.

He would be more careful next time. Whatever else, he had learned to respect the low cunning of this new generation of slaves and their untamed violence. The long ages through which he’d slept had changed them. The races were as they had been before, or at least nearly so, and he’d let that lull him into thinking that the men and women within the races were likewise unchanged. And perhaps some were. Perhaps it was only a few like Marcus Stormcrow and the half-breed girl whose willful natures had gone unchecked.

It didn’t matter. He knew now. He would do better next time.

He made one last lazy turn, and sloped down to the south. The bones in his back where his wings locked fast creaked and ached. The promise of rest plucked at him like a dragonet begging for food, insistent and endearing and annoying all at the same time. But there was no land wide enough for him yet. There would be. By morning, if not before. The wind of his own passage whispered in his ears until he could almost imagine voices in it.

And still, despite everything, the Stormcrow had helped him. Clinging to the side of the great tower, he had smelled again the coppery tang of his brother’s flesh as the last of Morade died. Each of the tiny creatures and the corruption they’d carried had burned and the fumes from them had felt like a promise. Morade had meant to steal away the use of the slaves, and he had done, once. Nearly did again. But Inys had won the battle against his dead brother. Yes, through unstable alliance. Yes, through subterfuge and lies. Yes, despite his own grief and despair. What mattered was only that it was done. Had the spiders spread, the slaves of the world would have been tainted forever. Untamable. Now Morade’s influence was gone, they could be made use of in a more systematic way. That credit belonged to the Stormcrow. For that, Inys resolved not to kill the treacherous servant. But he wouldn’t breed him. Mercy had limits.

The ache in his body grew worse slowly. That was fine. Pain was nothing. It was a message he could choose to ignore. He watched the jungle canopy below him until he scented the animals that made their homes beneath the nighttime green, and found a place where he might not be disturbed. With a shrug, he unlocked the bones of his back and canted his wings to cut the air. His descent felt like the long slow fall into sleep made physical. He was not only tired, but weary.

He landed harder than he’d intended, belly thumping against the ground, claws digging into the soil as he tried to slow himself. He came to rest against the trees and lay still, his eyes closed and the wounds in his flesh shouting in new pain. The emptiness of the world overwhelmed him. No air carried the scent of another of his kind. No water carried their taste. And he, like a fool, had allied himself with slaves. He could as well have expected loyalty from fish and pigs. An animal that could speak and write was still an animal. He had lowered himself to treat them with dignity. It was only that there was no one else.

He lifted his head in the air, opened his mouth to breathe more fully. For an hour, he stayed still, waiting, tasting, longing with a fervor worse than physical pain. And then—for a moment—he caught the scent. Cloying and musky and gone again even before he was certain it was there. It opened a vault of memories. His mother’s workshop in the South Tower, the air hot and rich with the smell of blood and iron, salt and sand. He remembered being so young he could do little more than perch and watch as she took her turn fashioning wonders for the court. He had thought little enough of it all then. He could wish now he’d been a better student. Now that all had been lost, and everything depended on how he could remake it.

Another workshop. Stale and empty, perhaps. Unused for ages come and passed, without doubt. Or a figment born from desire and the ability to lie to himself. It didn’t matter. It was all he had left, and so he would reach for it. At worst, he would die in the attempt. No one would mourn him. No one remained.

The steel barbs of the Stormcrow’s betrayal still clung to him like well-forged thorns. He plucked them out. The blood that came from them drew flies and scavengers, but Inys had more than enough flame now to keep them away. The trees here were so lush and heavy with water that no fire they took would spread for long. There were maggots hearty enough to live under scales, though, so he burned his wounds closed before he slept. The blood on his scales charred and flaked away, leaving him bright again. Scarred, but bright. It was the nearest he had to honor in a world where no other voice could ratify him. He was the highest of his kind and the lowest. Purest and most debased. It was the lack of community in which he might place himself that would eat his mind. If he wasn’t more careful. He had to be more careful.

When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of battle. His wounds and exhaustion must have taken more from him than he’d known, because he didn’t sense the hunter’s approach until he was already upon him.

He was young and alone with the pale skin and huge dark eyes of the Nightswarm. The race the others called Southlings now. He held a sling in his hand, but did not threaten Inys with it. His stillness was abject, and his scent all but covered by the paste of leaves and talc that decorated his skin. The animals he hunted would not know he was there until the blow came, but he had nothing that could harm Inys.

The hunter, aware that he’d been seen, did not flee. He took a single, tentative step nearer, and then, when Inys did nothing, another. The wide black eyes glimmered slightly with trapped moonlight. Inys caught the smell of fear now, and it reassured him. Good that the young one should fear. A dragon, even one as worn and broken as he was, deserved fear. When Inys shifted his head, the boy froze but did not retreat. For a time they considered each other. The only sounds were the ticking of leaves, the calls of night animals, the distant drum of thunder from a storm too far away to see. The hunter sank slowly to his knees and made a sign in the air with his two hands. It looked like the pantomime of a bird in flight, but Inys took it as a mark of respect. A self-abasement before something deserving of the Nightswarm’s awe.

Inys moved gingerly as much to keep from crushing the boy as from fear of reopening his own wounds, drawing himself up. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the hunter’s fear.

“You have a name, little one?” Inys asked.

“Amin,” the hunter said. His voice was deeper than his body suggested. Older. Perhaps Inys had misjudged him. “Amin of Emissir Large.”

“Your people are nearby?”

Amin pointed to the west. “Two nights. I am… I am no longer with them. I was cast out. I did something bad, and so I live here now.”

“An exile?”

“Yes,” Amin said, defiance in his voice. “I am.”

“What were your crimes?”

Amin’s eyes closed and he swayed for a moment before he opened them. They were full of tears. “Am I dreaming this? Are you my vision?”

“No. But if you seek a judge, I am it.”

The answer appeared to satisfy the Nightswarm. He sat and bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice was softer, but clear.

“There was a beast killing my people. I tracked it to its den, laid in wait, and I killed it. Myself. But when I brought it back to my people, my friend said he’d helped. He’d done nothing, but he said he’d been my equal and more than that. I… was angry. I didn’t mean for him to die. I would take it back if I could.”

Inys felt a rush of sorrow. “You cannot. None of us can. Not even me.”

The Nightswarm was quiet for a long moment. “You’re hurt?”

Inys glanced at himself. He’d been cut and healed and been cut again. The edges of his wings looked like ribbons and made his control muddy and rough. No, he wanted to say. This is nothing. No slave can hurt a dragon.

But what point was there in lying? He’d debased himself once by caring what they thought. By acting as though their good opinion of him mattered. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them. “I am.”

“I was a healer once. For my people, and for others. Perhaps…”

Inys shrugged and spread his wings. Do what you can.

Amin came close. Inys smelled the fear in him and heard it in the hummingbird-fast beating of his heart, but it did not affect the boy’s movement. The slave slowly cataloged the insults to Inys’s flesh, new and old both. The rips in his wings, unhealed since the battle in the south. The new burns and pricks still raw under the bandage of char. The long swaths where his scales had once been smooth as water and were now rougher than unfinished stone. An odd peace filled Inys. He recalled long baths of water and oil, tended by a dozen slaves. The gentle vibration of the rasp as teams of slaves sharpened his talons. It had been years ago, before the war started, when he’d lived in his cousin’s house and dreamed of besting his brothers… No, not years. More than that. More than centuries. Even Marcus Stormcrow had only addressed Inys’s body as a thing of convenience and need. To feel cared for, even in so small a way, called forth an ache deep in Inys’s breast.

And then the chanting began. Amin’s hands brushed his scales, his wings. A warmth radiated out from the slave’s fingertips, and Inys felt an energy answering it. As if his own ability to heal had been sleeping and now roused, the dragon felt the rough scales shift and realign. The torn fabric of his wings knit together. The aches of his newest wounds and his oldest scars eased, even where they had been for so long he’d forgotten the ache was there. But that was not the greatest gift the chanting carried.

Against all hope, the melody was one Inys knew. He didn’t realize it at first, lost in the bliss of his remaking, but soon he realized he was anticipating the song, expecting the rising trill, the falling cadence, the near resolution that danced away again. It was one he had heard from Asteril when they’d been young and fresh as a first flight. The syllables were foreign and unfamiliar, but when he turned his attention to it, there were even fragments of the old languages. Bits of human words that echoed and carried all unknowing the power of humanity’s masters, even in the masters’ absence.

And that, Inys thought, his heart lifting in joy, was more than a lone healer’s cantrip. That was the whole of the world. He had thought the dragons gone, apart from himself, but it was true only in one sense. Yes, he was, unless another sleeper lay buried in the world, the last to lay claim to his own whole body, his own complete mind. But like the shards from a broken glass, the dragons were still everywhere. In the bodies of the races they’d made, in the poems and magics that their cunning men passed down through the generations, in the slave paths they had imposed on the changing face of the earth.

He remembered a little thing his first teacher, Myrix, had shown him. A sheet of crystal with a moment’s light captured within it, so that the paths of it shaped any new raw light into the form of it. As the surface of a pond alive with ripples and then suddenly frozen held the pattern of all the cooperating and annihilating waves, even a sliver of the crystal was formed of all that the full stone knew. With a sense of comprehension deeper than love, Inys saw that the world was the same way.

The shards of the dragons were in the laws that humans enforced upon each other. In the shapes of their bodies and the functions of their minds. The way their cities grew and the melodies of their songs. To bring the dragons forth again into the world wouldn’t be an act of creation, but of reassembly. He shuddered with pleasure. And with hope.

The chanting stopped. Amin stepped back. How long it had been, Inys couldn’t say, only the sun was in the sky now, pricking at the Nightswarm boy’s too-large eyes. Amin’s skin was covered in a sheen of sour-smelling sweat, and he trembled. His heart was calm, though. The fear was gone.

Inys took stock, and was pleased. Even with the char fallen away, his wounds no longer bled. The scars of his old battles had faded or vanished away. Even the tatters and holes of his wings had been repaired, the membrane thinner where it had ripped, but whole again. When he stood and stretched his wings out, his bones didn’t ache. He was astonished at how much of himself the slave had offered up.

Inys folded himself down to consider the boy. The Nightswarm blinked and made the curious gesture again. This time it seemed less the motion of a bird and more that of a dragon’s wings.

“I am on a desperate journey,” Inys said. “I will remake my kind and redeem my errors, but the path I seek is long and terrible. You have already done me great good. Greater even than you know. I name you Amin Stormcrow, first among my servants and destined to command all those who follow after, three upon three upon three.”

The boy fell to his knees. “I… I am yours,” he said.

“Swear to me now that you will never act against me. That you will never betray me.”

“I swear I will never betray you, higher-than-mothers. What you wish, I shall wish. Now and always.”

Inys shifted back a degree. He sensed no duplicity in the boy’s words, but neither had he in Marcus Stormcrow or the half-breed banker girl. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them.

“I don’t believe you,” Inys said, and killed him.

The Nightswarm’s blood had a strange, almost peppery taste, and his flesh was tough. Inys ate until his belly was full, then launched into the wide, open air, testing his newly-healed wings and leaving the rest of the body behind for the flies and jungle scavengers. Within the hour, he found the coast—huge waves breaking on a beach of perfect white sand. He landed in the high surf gently, delicately, and washed the last of the boy’s blood from his scales. Then, for a time, he lay on the sand-strewn beach, his neck stretched out. The sun warmed him and the sound of the water lulled him until, half dreaming, he felt he could hear a choir of dragons, their voices raised in song, in among the waves.

Refreshed, renewed, and confirmed in his task, he would fly to the south until he unearthed the workshop or discovered it definitively to be a mirage. He would gather all that he could of dragon-nature from the world, distill it, and call it forth to its true and purer form. He would redeem his error. All his errors.

Only first, he would sleep a while. Not for long, though. Not again.

Marcus

They left the permanent green of the dragon’s road behind them in the middle morning, where it curved north along the track toward Kaltfel and Anninfort. The little villages that clung to the jade path, making their keep from the traffic of merchants and farmers and all human trade like ticks on a dog’s ear, vanished quickly behind them. The roads turned to gravel or mud or two strips of crushed grass running parallel across the fields, a cart’s width apart. The last march of the war was to be on human paths. That seemed like an omen, though Marcus was damned if he could say if it was a good one or bad.

The farmhouses and stream-run mills they passed weren’t only Firstblood homes. The men and women and children who came out to gawk as they passed were also fur-pelted Kurtadam shaved to the skin for summer, Jasuru with scales that looked more like a dragon’s now that he’d seen a dragon up close, reed-thin Cinnae, even a family of tusk-jawed Yemmu. No Timzinae, though. Or at least none the company hadn’t brought itself.

The land itself was lush with the high summer. Tall grasses hummed with insect life. The sun’s heat would have been stifling if a breeze hadn’t stirred the air. The trees had traded the peapod-green leaves of spring for deeper, more mature foliage that, in ten weeks or so, would shrivel and brown and fall. There were no flowers on the branches and few on the bushes, but green nuts and acorns, ripening berries and seedpods. They rode through a deep scent of growth and decay, the complex perfume of every summer ever. They weren’t a day outside the city, and already the jays and sparrows here were unaware there’d been a war on. Would have been astonished to hear it.

Jorey’s scouts met them in the early afternoon; bone-thin men whose eyes registered neither grief nor wonder at seeing them there, hearing the news of the Lord Regent’s death and the slaughter of the spider goddess. They only nodded, accepting what they heard because the strength it would have taken to feel anything was beyond them. They wouldn’t be called heroes when this was done. Just soldiers, and maybe not even that. It didn’t seem right.

Aster rode at the column’s head on a silver mare that might have been bred to the task of looking regal and being calm. The boy himself sat his mount like he’d been born to it. Maybe he had. Marcus didn’t know much about the tradition of horsemanship in Antea, but it was a common enough way to make a leader seem greater than those around him. And Aster would need all of that he could muster. Someone had convinced him to shave off the peach-fuzz moustache he’d been attempting and Cithrin had reminded him a bit of how to seem older than he truly was. Better to look youthful than young, she’d said. Odd, the way tricks and skills once learned cycled back to be useful again in strange circumstances.

And, as if in echo of the boy at the column’s head, the Timzinae children rode behind, tended by Clara Kalliam and a dozen other women of the court. Eight carts of girls and boys, most too young for heavy labor, and each with a fresh new toy to cling to, each fed with raisin cakes and lemon bread. Each in bright new clothing that had belonged to a Firstblood child not long ago, or else had been newly sewn for the occasion. The contents of Geder Palliako’s gaol. The ones who’d survived. They’d wrapped them up like wedding presents, as though acting as if it were a celebration could forgive the gaps in their lines. The ones who wouldn’t come home.

For himself, Marcus tried to ignore the pain. A young Southling cunning man had done her best to patch his opened arm back together, and all in all she’d done a serviceable job. Apart from a hole the size of a coin near his shoulder, he wasn’t bleeding anymore, and even that was only weeping. The poisoned sword was back in the city, which likely helped as well. It was hard to believe that any wound, however well tended, would mend in that thing’s presence.

Yardem rode at his side, and by the time they reached the little confluence of streams that was their goal, he’d almost stopped checking whether Marcus was about to fall off his horse every third breath. Not that the concern wasn’t appreciated in spirit. It was the practice that annoyed. In the end it mattered that his armor fit him, which it did well enough, that the soldiers who rode with him looked more an honor guard than a fighting force, and that Cithrin rode by Aster’s side. Cithrin bel Sarcour of the Medean bank, who’d risked life and fortune for the Timzinae in occupied Suddapal, and was about to trade her reputation and eight cartfuls of children for peace. Assuming she could find a buyer.

God knew she looked the part. She didn’t wear mail, but she managed to make a well-cut dress and a hunter’s leathers seem as imposing. Her Cinnae mother’s blood left her seeming elegant more than frail, her Firstblood father having given her a strength about the spine and shoulders. Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe Cithrin was only Cithrin, and her virtues and flaws her own. She was old enough to have earned them. If he could still see the amateur smuggler called Tag when he looked at her, it didn’t matter. How she seemed to him wasn’t the point. What mattered was how she—how all of them—impressed Karol Dannien. Or failed to.

The field of parley wasn’t actually a field this time. Low, sharp hills marked the path like the landscape stuttering. The curve of one made a natural amphitheater, open to the south so that when Dannien and his men arrived, Lord Emming, Cithrin, Aster, and Marcus himself were all waiting at the table. It was the kind of staging Kit would approve of. Or no. Would have approved of. Marcus still couldn’t quite believe the old actor had walked into the flames that way…

The banner of Antea and Aster’s personal sigil hung above them. The blood-red banner of the priests was absent. The carts stood a little apart, but not so far that the opposing force could overlook them. The presence of children alone argued against violence, or Marcus hoped it did. Seemed rude to slaughter anyone else where the little ones could see, but worse things had happened in the world. And he could tell from the way Dannien walked that he was angry.

Cep Bailan strode at Dannien’s side bare-chested, rolls of blubber shifting as he walked and his ornate blue tattoos brightened by sweat like stones in water. Summer in Antea couldn’t be a pleasant place for a Haaverkin, but Bailan had chosen to take work in the south. And if the heat exhausted him, maybe he wouldn’t talk much. The man was an ass. Behind them, Timzinae soldiers stood in ranks, swords at their sides, and stared across the gap at the children. Even at this distance, Marcus saw the focus—as strong as hunger—that fought against their discipline. How many of those men there had children among the hostages? Nephews, nieces, daughters, and sons. As many as Geder had hauled up north, it didn’t seem any family in Suddapal could have gone untouched.

Dannien sat at his chair, his gaze roving across the opposing group, lingering on each in turn. Bailan only collapsed onto his stool and panted, waving a hand at his face like a fan. Aster’s expression was calm. Either the boy didn’t understand he was facing a man who’d sworn to kill not just him but everyone who served him or else he had the makings of a better-than-average king. Ignorance and bravery could be hard to distinguish with only one experience to judge from. Dannien’s gaze skipped over Emming like he wasn’t there, but lingered on Cithrin and stopped at Marcus with a nod.

“Ran away last time,” Dannien said.

Ignoring Aster was a calculated rudeness. Taking offense was the first step down a path they didn’t want, so Marcus chuckled. “Wouldn’t count on it again. It’s not a trick that works twice.”

“Be drinking on it the rest of the season, though. Karol Dannien, the man who made Marcus Wester sneak away in the night.” Despite himself, Marcus tensed. Dannien smiled and turned to Aster. “So, are we here for terms of surrender?”

“This isn’t a surrender,” Cithrin said. “Your enemy’s already conquered. We’ve come to bring the happy news and offer you our help as allies. You know who I am, yes?”

“I do,” Dannien said grudgingly. “And I’m as surprised to see you on the other side of this as I was to see Wester. Figured he’d got his head folded by these priests, now maybe you have too.”

“They’re dead,” Emming said. “We killed them all. We killed them. Prince Aster and the others here. Our nation has been through a nightmare. Nightmare!”

Cithrin hid her annoyance well. Not perfectly, but well. “It’s true. The spider priests were an artifact of the dragons, built to make war between—”

“I know,” Dannien said. “I read the letters. I’ve been getting updated from the council and your Magistra Isadau damn near since I went on this campaign.”

“Then you know this wasn’t Antea’s fault,” Cithrin said.

“That I do not,” Dannien said. Cep Bailan wheezed and leaned forward, his head on the table. Dannien kicked him, and he sat back up. “So how’s about you tell me the whole story of how Antea could slaughter thousands, burn villages to the ground, put free men and women in slave collars, and throw babies off bridges, and still have clean hands.”

It wasn’t the best reception they could have hoped for, but it wasn’t the worst. Cithrin leaned forward, her chin high the way Kit and Cary had taught her once, years ago. She spoke clearly, cleanly, without flourishes or rhetoric. She laid out the story like she was a scout bringing a report. Every time Emming tried to insert himself, she cut him back.

Through Geder Palliako, the priests had taken root in Camnipol, subjugating it long before Antea’s aggressions in the east. The priests had spread lies and fear, and those who’d stood against them had been killed or exiled. Camnipol had been as much under a conqueror’s thumb as Nus or Inentai or Suddapal. The forces that had resisted it had been met with ruthless slaughter, not the least of them Dawson Kalliam, who had been the first to stand against Palliako and his priests.

But it was over now, the priests destroyed, Palliako dead, and Aster—the rightful king—returned to the throne. The way she told it, Dannien and his men had been in alliance with Aster even as they invaded his lands, only they hadn’t known it.

It was a vast simplification, and like all of its sort, it erased what Cithrin wanted gone. Geder had been working with her as well at the end, but no call to point that up. Evil, false rulers were easier to understand. The children thrown to their deaths hadn’t been ordered so by the priests. The slaves whipped and abused on Antean farms hadn’t suffered because of Basrahip, but because of the instinctive cruelty of people in power over those they controlled. Her story ignored generations of Antean wars in the Free Cities, the suppressed revolt of Anninfort, the whole long history of battle and conquest, blood and fire and sword that was human history even without the dragons to spur them into it. To hear Cithrin speak, war had been created by Morade and hidden in a box that Geder opened. It felt to Marcus like a lie. But a necessary one.

“So that’s it?” Dannien said when she finished. “Tyrant’s dead, rightful king’s on the throne, and now all’s made right in the land? That how it’s supposed to work?”

“You can come back to the city with us,” Emming said. “Send your emissary or come yourself. You can see it’s all true.”

“What do I care if your tower won’t stand up?” Dannien said. “I’ve been walking for a lot of weeks now with people who’ve lost homes and family. Who didn’t do anything but be born to the wrong race. And if you think for half a minute there won’t be a reckoning for what’s happened, you’re mad and stupid too. Even you, Magistra.”

“There will be,” Cithrin said. “There will be a reckoning. There has to be. But it will be in coin and land. Trades, treaties. Compensations. Not blood. There’ll be no reckoning in blood. Here.” She took the little golden cask from under her chair and put it on the table for Dannien to take. “It’s letters to every farmhold in Antea. It frees every Timzinae slave, whether they were taken in the war or indentured before then. All of them.”

“Really?” Dannien said. “Going to feed me my own food next? I can free anyone I see fit and put any farmers that disagree in with the pig slop. What do I need your word for to do it?”

“It’s a gesture,” Cithrin said.

Cep Bailan, recovered from the heat, grinned. He had an ugly grin. “I know another gesture. Wanna see it?”

“Fuck’s sake, Karol,” Marcus said. “They’re trying to end this.”

“So they don’t get their own noses bloodied,” Dannien snapped. “Let ’em see what losing a war feels like, and maybe they won’t be so damned fast to start the next one.”

“Didn’t slow you down,” Cithrin said, and the frustration and contempt in her voice were like a slap. Dannien stood up. This wasn’t going well, and Cithrin wasn’t done. “Elassae learned a lot about war and how much good it does, but you’re still here turning aside the opportunity to stop it. Why should they learn something from being hurt? You didn’t.”

“Elassae didn’t start this, and you don’t get to tell me when to end it. If I want to kick Antea’s balls until I’m bored with doing it, that’s mine to choose. I’ll go back to camp now,” Dannien said, his voice low and dangerous. “And I’ll confer with my men. If we decide to accept your surrender, I’ll let you know. Meantime, you guarantee the safety of all the hostages. All of them. Tomorrow, maybe we’ll talk.”

Cithrin nodded crisply, Emming less so. When Aster spoke, it surprised them all.

“No,” the boy said. “You take them. I won’t make them go back to Camnipol. They need their parents, and their parents need them. I didn’t bring them as hostages.”

“Ah,” Dannien said, suddenly on the wrong foot. “All right, then.”

Aster rose to face the mercenary captain. His eyes were clear and his voice stronger than Marcus had expected it to be. He was maybe a third of Dannien’s mass, and damned little of it muscle. He hardly looked older than the Timzinae children in the carts. Marcus felt his gut clench and had to fight the urge to push the boy king back, to put himself between Aster and the enemy soldiers.

“This is my fault,” Aster said, “because this is my kingdom. When my father died, I was too young and too weak to rule. I should have protected Antea. And Elassae as well. I didn’t, but I’m older now. And I’m stronger. If the council feels that there has to be more blood, say so. You can kill as many of us as you need to make it right. Give me a number, and I’ll bring them to you. I only ask that you start with me.”

Cep Bailan shrugged and put a hand on the hilt of his sword, but Dannien was the one who mattered, and he shifted his weight, confused.

Aster said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to stop this sooner.”

Dannien pressed his lips together until they went white. “Well,” he said. And then, “Shit.”

The coffeehouse looked out over the Division toward the ruin that was the Kingspire. For that matter, the ruin that was Camnipol. The whole city—carts and carters, beggars and bakers, everyone from the highest lord to the mange-hatted dog sulking at the alley’s mouth—had the half-stunned look of a man trying not to faint. But when Marcus glanced down into the chasm of the Division, past the bridges of wood and stone to the rope-and-chain contrivances below, he could see the ruins of other Camnipols. The city had been broken before, collapsed, and been rebuilt. This present stumble wasn’t the worst it had seen.

Cithrin, sitting at his side, drank her coffee and sighed. Yardem, sitting across from them both, stuck to beer. Marcus only wanted water. Since he’d stopped wearing the sword, an acuity was returning to his tongue that left it easily overwhelmed. He hoped that stage would pass too.

The staff of the little house walked around them like they were lions, as likely to claw the help as ask for bread. He supposed that was fair. Cithrin bel Sarcour, who had humiliated and ultimately destroyed the beloved or despised Lord Regent. Who had thrown down the false goddess or else brought the world into a new age of lies. Who had saved Camnipol or else debased it before the Timzinae. Aster had made it clear that she was under the protection of the Severed Throne, but Marcus kept at least one guard with her wherever she went. It was a little odd to realize that, killer of kings and hero of Wodford and Gradis, he wasn’t the most storied person at any table where he sat with Cithrin.

“Jorey Kalliam’s called the disband,” Marcus said.

“I heard,” Cithrin replied. “But I don’t think he’s planning to throw a triumph.”

“He should,” Marcus said. “If people pretend there’s a reason to celebrate, it won’t be long before they convince themselves it’s truth.”

Cithrin’s chuckle wasn’t much more than a low noise in her throat. It sounded like satisfaction. Marcus found himself smiling as well. Yardem… well, he seemed amused, but it was hard to tell with him sometimes.

Most of the morning had been spent in what they were calling a business meeting. For the most part, it was the same thing that came after any battle. Relief and fear and anger and more relief coming out in stories and jokes and fights. And the weird melancholy that came at the end of a contract. He’d never understood why the end of a war should carry that sense of rootless mild sorrow, but it did. Something about endings, even when what had ended, was awful.

Yardem had told the story of Geder’s death again. Marcus, his minimal description of killing Basrahip. Cithrin retold the attack against Inys, the death of Kitap rol Keshmet, the only good priest in the history of the world. Or maybe that was only Marcus being cynical. Hard to say. With every story, the sense that they’d actually come to a place of relative calm and safety grew. Yes, Dannien was leading the men south. Yes, the Timzinae slaves were freed, and their children—the ones who remained—were going back to Elassae. Yes, the spider priests were dead. And Geder Palliako with them. The bravery of Aster and their hopes for his reign. Jorey’s return. Clara Kalliam’s role in rallying the court. All the things that had happened and were happening and would come in the future, as certain as kittens in springtime. And then, like a child before sleep, Cithrin would ask a question or clarification that really meant “Tell me again,” and Yardem would. And Marcus would listen. And at the end, they’d begin again.

Though there was one part that kept catching on his mind like a splinter too small to see. Invisible still, but present…

“So that’s done,” Marcus said, lifting his cup toward the serving boy to call for more water. “What’s the plan from here?”

Cithrin smiled. “I’d thought that was obvious,” she said. “We won’t get a better opportunity. I’ve already written the letters to Paerin and Komme. We have to open a branch in Camnipol.”

“Of course you do,” Marcus said.

“The only way Aster will ever be able to pay reparations to Elassae and Sarakal is war gold,” Cithrin said. “And it’ll help build trust back with Northcoast and Birancour once they’re all part of the same system.”

“A temple,” Yardem said, “in every city she conquers.”

Probably, he was joking.

Cithrin

The war was over.

The thought couldn’t quite find its resting place in Cithrin’s mind. It rattled through her like the last dried pea in a jar. The war was over. The priests were gone, the goddess killed, Morade’s vengeance wiped from the world. Geder was dead. The war was over. No one was going to die at the edge of a sword today, or at least no one more than the usual. Her heart should have been all songs and celebrations, and perhaps it would have been, except she couldn’t sleep.

Now that’d she’d come out of hiding, the world around her had changed. She took rooms at the moral successor of the inn Paerin Clark had brought her to her first time in Camnipol. A lifetime ago. The new place was on the ruins of the old, and the halls still stank of fresh wood and paint. The rooms were larger, and the one she’d taken had its own little balcony that looked down on the street, a table for her to work at, if she had any work, an anteroom where her guard could sleep and make sure no one slipped in during the night to slit her throat. The keeper was an elderly Dartinae woman whose glowing eyes reminded Cithrin of the sun behind clouds. The keeper’s husband treated Cithrin and her guards like ambassadors from a powerful country, as perhaps they were. The morning sun greeted Cithrin with coffee and eggs, the night with wine and salt crackers. And more wine after that, without any hesitation or hint of disapproval. Despite all that, Cithrin felt like a six-legged pony trotted out for the amusement of the crowd.

The city and the kingdom—and perhaps the world—seemed in a moment of stillness, like the pause between breaths. They were between what had happened before and what would come next, and she was that uncertainty made flesh. Cithrin bel Sarcour, once the deadly enemy of Antea, and now confidant of Prince Aster and Clara Kalliam, her son Jorey. She was welcomed in the imperial court because Aster insisted on it, and because everyone there was shaken and frightened and ready for the world to be something different than it had been. So long as Cithrin held her head at the best angle, so long as she walked with authority and spoke with confidence, she would be assumed to have power. And so perhaps she did.

She traveled under guard always. Geder had stripped the court of any dissent or disloyalty. If he’d survived the plan, they might have been able to use that to steer the court. Now there would be some who still believed in his cause, since he was no longer there to disavow it. People would still call the Timzinae roaches, as they had before the priests had come. They would still look down upon them, as the Yemmu disdained the Tralgu; the Cinnae, the Kurtadam; everyone everywhere, the Drowned. The war was over, but humanity was still itself. The hatred might last forever. The injustice. The petty cruelty and moral blindness.

There was no call to believe that wars would not come again, and for reasons as obscure or justified, as they had without Morade’s spiders. Blood and innocent lives were still the currency of empires, as they had been in the absence of the priests.

But the spiders wouldn’t spread, and Cithrin was not yet done.

During the day, she made herself present at court and among the merchant class of Camnipol. At night, she sat in her room and drank until she fell into a stupor not so unlike sleep. Or walked the night-black streets in the center of a protecting square of swordsmen. Or sat in the taproom, beer in one hand, and watched the players there put on another version of The Butcher’s Daughter with the part of PennyPenny played by a sweet-faced Jasuru who seemed all too happy to mock his own race.

Her players—Cary and Sandr and Mikel, Charlit Soon and Lak—were gone. As gone as Kit. As gone as Smit. As gone as Pyk Usterhall and Opal. They’d left without saying goodbye to her, leaving only a note saying that Camnipol was too rich in sorrow for them anymore. That their tour had begun in tragedy, and that they would follow it until there was a comedy again. Or a romance. Or an adventure that they could bring themselves to smile at. Cithrin didn’t blame them, but she felt their absence like a wound on some part of her that she could touch.

And so when Wester had said he was leaving as well, it had been doubly hard.

He’d brought his bad news in the afternoon. The high Antean summer was announcing its end with bright mornings and hard rains. Cithrin, on her way back from an informal gathering with Clara Kalliam and a nobleman named Curtin Issandrian, had paused in a baker’s shop while the clouds dropped a small river onto the city. The roar of the water would have been frightening if the men and women of the city hadn’t shrugged it off quite so calmly. Along with the lemon tea and the plate of flaky butter bread, Cithrin took comfort in the way the baker and her son treated the downpour as an inconvenience. She sat at the front, suffering a little mist for the pleasure of watching the streets flow like little streams, the filth and wreckage that came from humanity simply going through its day being washed away. Marcus, sitting across from her, had cleared his throat in a way that meant something.

“I’ve sent for Enen,” he said. “She’s a solid lead, been with us since Porte Oliva. She’s bringing a full company of guard with her. As long as you’re here, you’ll want watching, and I don’t recommend hiring local talent. Too many people in this city have been asleep for too long. Can’t trust they’ll all wake up just because it’s morning.”

“You think we need more guards?” she’d said, but there had been a tightness in her chest even then.

“Different’s more the issue,” he said. “There’s some things Yardem and I need to take care of.”

As the baker had made little of the rain, Marcus said the words like they only meant going off to visit an aunt or having a contract signed. She surrendered to understanding, and must have reacted, because Marcus took her hand.

“Inys?” she said.

“Among others,” Marcus said. “Just some things that want attention.”

A hundred questions had swirled through her, each clamoring to be the one that passed her lips first: How can you track a dragon? Do you think the danger from him’s real? What if Camnipol rises again in revenge for Geder and the Kingspire and the end of the war? What if Elassae changes its mind and marches back in force? Her world was a labyrinth of uncertainties, contingencies and barely restrained chaos. Which, in fairness, it had always been.

“Will you be coming back?” she asked. She cared about all the information, but this was the only question that seemed critical.

Marcus’s smile was as much an answer as his words. “Hope to, but you know how the world is.”

“I do,” she said. He’d nodded, and that was the last they’d spoken. When they got back to the inn, Yardem had horses ready for the two of them. The Tralgu had folded her in a vast, warm embrace, his chin resting on top of her head while she wept a little, and then they were gone.

She’d spent the evening on the roof of the inn, sitting on a stool and watching the carts hauling debris away from the royal quarter in the north to drop into the Division. The sun, setting behind her, had lit the high, ornate clouds in gold and orange. And then grey. She’d drunk a full bottle of wine by herself on that roof and had come back down steady as a stone.

And so she was a little drunk and a little maudlin three days later when, without warning, Magistra Isadau arrived.

Cithrin caught sight of her from the balcony as Isadau and her guards walked toward the inn from the public stables. She wore a dress the color of gold with a lacework shawl blacker than her scales, but no armor that Cithrin could see. Her guards were Firstblood men and Yemmu women, all in mail, with swords and axes at their sides, and the glowering expressions of people who’d taken up that kind of work because they enjoyed hurting people. Even in the relative darkness of the summer twilight, a crowd lingered at the margin of the group. A Timzinae woman walking in Camnipol. A sign that, welcome or not, change had come. The mix of pride and joy and apprehension was not made simpler by the dead bottles of wine at Cithrin’s feet.

The urge to wave and call and maybe crawl out the window and slide down the tiled roof to where she could lower herself down to the courtyard fought with the sense that she should behave as if she were already the voice of the Medean bank in Camnipol. Which meant clearing away the bottles and skins and chewing a handful of mint fairly quickly. She wiped away the tears she’d been crying, threw the evidence of her dissolution into a sack under her bed, and washed her hands and feet before the scratch came at the door.

“Yes?” Cithrin said, her heart racing.

“It’s a Magistra Isadau,” the guard’s voice said.

And then Isadau’s. “I’ve come to speak with you about… about the peace, I suppose.”

Cithrin opened the door. The older woman stood there like a vision from a dream. Her smile was calm and amused, her hands folded before her. Only the flickering of the nictitating membranes in her eyes, opening and closing without ever blocking her gaze, gave any sign of the strength of Isadau’s emotions. For a moment, Cithrin was frozen, filled with the powerful and irrational fear that anger was shaking the Timzinae woman. That by saving Camnipol from the armies of Elassae, Cithrin had lost her respect.

And then Isadau stepped into the room and opened her arms. Cithrin fell into her the way she imagined a sister might. Isadau smelled of earthy perfume and sweat and the open air.

“I’ve missed you,” Isadau said.

“You too,” Cithrin said.

Cithrin led her to the little table and sat with her, their two hands touching like a priest offering comfort to a mourner.

“How are things in Suddapal?” Cithrin asked.

Isadau’s laugh was low and rueful. “Complicated. Very complicated. But improving. After Kiaria, the fighting all through Elassae was vicious. It was only the Anteans at first, but after they’d been driven back, there was more. The occupation undid some of things that kept the five cities playing nicely with each other. In the last year, I’ve been brokering armistice agreements between the oligarchs as much as helping with the war against Antea.”

“Ah,” Cithrin said, and her mind caught at the fact. Found a toehold. “Is that why they had Dannien leading the army and not a Timzinae?”

“Yes,” Isadau said. “The mercenary was the compromise everyone hated least. And he was good, which was a blessing. He sent word of his victory along with the children. The ones who survived.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cithrin said. “How bad was it?”

Isadau’s smile was wistful. “Jurin lost one of his sons in the fighting. Kani is fine, though our mother is gone. She left the world last winter. It wasn’t violent, but I think it was the war. Seeing her world tear itself apart was an injury, if not a physical one. War always has more casualties than we see. All the things that we might have done instead are lost as well.”

“Could have made a glorious world with what we spent on this one. Or at least a few decent roads,” Cithrin said. She felt as though she were speaking in Wester’s voice, and the pang of loss came again. “Wait. Salan? Is he…?”

“Wounded in the battle that broke the Antean army. It went septic, but it didn’t carry him off. He still has fevers sometimes, and the cunning man says he will have for the rest of his life.”

“That’s terrible,” Cithrin said.

“Only give him so much sympathy. He’s been known to play the crippled patriot more than once for the joy of the role. The way he’s living now, he’s more likely to die from an angry lover than an old wound.”

“Still,” Cithrin said, her hands rising to her throat. She undid the necklace there, pulled the pendant of the little bird from her chest, and held it out for Isadau to take. The older woman looked at it, shifting the necklace in her hand so that it caught the light. “He wanted me to keep it until the war was over.”

“And it is,” Isadau said, and tucked the bird away, “isn’t it?”

Cithrin smiled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Isadau’s frown was so slight it barely seemed to exist. Cithrin still felt it like a thorn.

“How are you?” Isadau asked.

“I’m fine,” Cithrin said, lightly. And then, “I’m not fine. I don’t know how I am. Everything I had, everything I thought or felt, was bent toward getting here. All the plans brought me here, except the ones about how to handle Geder afterward, and those don’t matter anymore.”

“You’ve won.”

“I have, but I now that I see it, I don’t understand what victory is at all. Somehow, I thought it would mean an ending. That we’d cut away Morade’s priests and all they’d done, we’d stop the armies and the fighting, and then… I don’t know. It would be over. We’d all be together and everyone would be all right. Only that isn’t how it works, is it?”

“It’s not,” Isadau said. “There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing.”

“I didn’t think I’d have to mourn my victories.”

“And now you know something you didn’t.”

Out in the street, a dog barked in excitement and a woman shouted back in anger. In the distance, a murmur of thunder. Cithrin rubbed her hand across the table, feeling the grain of the wood, listening to the sound of her own skin hushing. They let the moment sit with them quietly like a third person until, gently and politely, it left.

“Have you thought about where you want to be next?” Isadau asked.

“I’m not sure. We need to open a branch here, and I’m either the perfect person to do it or absolutely the wrong one, and I’m not sure yet how to tell which. And then there’s Porte Oliva. I know Birancour wasn’t part of the bank’s long-term plan, but my branch there made money. With the damage to the city, there are going to be opportunities.”

“And I think you may not technically have finished your apprenticeship,” Isadau said.

“You must be joking.”

“I am, and I’m not,” Isadau said. “I don’t think anyone can argue that you’re inexperienced at this point, but there are some advantages that another decade of life might offer. A shared branch, for instance. Chana Medean is drawing up proposals.”

“Is she?”

“Between us? I think Komme would be willing to make accommodations with you just from fear you’d start your own competing company. You have a strong position. You should think about where you would be happy.”

Cithrin blinked. Where I would be happy. It was like a language she didn’t know.

“I’ve come for two reasons,” Isadau said. “There’s an ambassador coming from Elassae as soon as the coronation’s done. The common wisdom has it that the bank is the ideal intermediary for forging a real treaty. We’re respected on both sides, we’re seen as neutral, though not by everyone, and the war gold in the west has become something of a fashion. They see promise in it. I’ve been asked by my country to confer with you and bring back anything that would be useful to them.”

“Do they really think you will?”

“They aren’t wrong,” Isadau said. “I love my people, and I will go a very long way to find justice for them.”

“Sorry,” Cithrin said. “That’s fair.”

“The other reason is more complex, but not unrelated. Something strange has happened with the war gold.”

Cithrin felt herself shift forward on her chair. A glimmer in Isadau’s eyes said the other woman had noticed. “What is it?”

“The merchant guilds in Stollbourne have started valuing debt in Carse above debt from Herez. They’re calling it a confidence discount.”

“What?”

“A cargo valued at fiftyweight of gold,” Isadau said, “is being paid with forty-eight if the notes are against King Tracian’s debt. The full fifty if it’s from the Herez contract.”

Cithrin sat back. “But it’s the same gold. Or not-gold. War gold. Why would—”

“Herez is relaxing tariffs on its blue-water trade. Komme isn’t certain yet if Stollbourne’s decision is an attempt to keep Northcoast’s trade where it is, or to call Herez’s letters into question. Either way, a weight of gold isn’t a weight of gold any longer, depending on who it belongs to.”

“Well,” Cithrin said. “That’s… interesting.”

“Komme is thinking of how to stop it, but—”

“No,” Cithrin said. “No, wait. We should look at that first. There may be an opportunity in there. What happens, do you think, when you trade money for money?”

“I’m not sure I even understand the question.”

“I’m not either,” Cithrin said. “Let’s talk this through…”

Cithrin had dinner brought up to them after the first hour passed. Roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, underripe apples in honey and spice. A bottle of wine that for once she didn’t crave particularly. They talked about money and wealth and value, and how each term meant a different, if related, thing. How the war gold could disconnect them, or make the relationships more flexible. What the bank could accomplish, and what it risked by trying.

When, near midnight, Isadau pled exhaustion, Cithrin walked her to her rooms. Her mind felt like morning light and cool water, and she was sure she wouldn’t sleep. But when she did lie down on her bed, the breeze of the Antean night slipping in at the window like a cat, she found her body relaxed and the pillow comfortable. She played scenario after scenario out in her mind: what would happen if the bank declared that debt couldn’t be transferred between nations; what would happen if it could only be traded at values they set; at values the merchants themselves set; if the bank charged one on the hundred for making the transfer; if the crown did.

As the versions became less and less real, the half logic of dreams spinning out along lines of debt and credit, the phrase came back, as clear as if it had been spoken. And, oddly, it came back in Marcus Wester’s voice, not Isadau’s.

Where would you be happy?

It isn’t where, she thought. Here or in Porte Oliva or Carse. I’ll be happy. Or else I won’t. Even when I’m miserable, I’ll be doing the work I’m best at. That’s better than happiness, and there’s not one person in a thousand who can claim it.

I’ll be fine.

She smiled before she slept.

Clara

On the first day of King Aster’s coronation ceremony, they burned an empty pyre.

It wasn’t something done as part of the ceremony proper. There was precedent for it when someone had died in a way that their body couldn’t be found or brought back for the family, so it was known generally as a sailor’s pyre, but it wasn’t for seamen this time. In an abundance of tact, no one said outright whose absent body the fires consecrated. Those who have fallen in defense of the empire was the phrase most often used. It might have meant the soldiers who’d died in Asterilhold and Sarakal, Elassae and the Free Cities and Birancour. It might have meant the bodies left unburied in the snowdrifts and ice west of Bellin or the governors and protectors of Nus and Inentai and Suddapal, lost now in the uprisings there.

To Clara, it meant the men who’d died the day the Kingspire broke. Vicarian, the other priests, and Lord Regent Geder Palliako.

Lehrer Palliako’s presence at the burning made the point without anyone’s having to speak. Aster was there too, his eyes red from tears or smoke. Clara sat with Jorey and Barriath, present as the mother of her sons. Her remaining sons. Sabiha and Lady Skestinin sat with her as well, and all of them wept, though not for Geder. And in the court, the grey rags of mourning were tied around the arms and throats of the representatives of all the great houses. But the sleeves beneath the armbands were green, the cloths that people used to dab away their tears had leaf-shaped embroidery, and no one had the unutterably poor taste to wear ossuary on their jackets. The currents of the court might not have found their channel yet, but if fashion was anything to judge from, Geder Palliako had fallen from grace with history.

Clara wished in her heart that she could feel some pang of sympathy for him. Already, he was being painted in the stories and gossip of the court as at best an incompetent and at worst a traitor. The man who’d delivered the nation to dark wizards and foolish wars. The worst steward the Severed Throne had suffered since Lord Sellandin, eight generations back, and likely worse than he’d been.

A priest in white robes chanted in the smoke of the pyre, calling on the traditional cult gods of Antea. After the rite was done, the fire under the empty structure still burning, Clara and the others murmured their respects and retired to a wide rose garden for a light meal. The blooms were long since gone from the bushes, of course, but the leaves were bright and lush and the thorns seemed somehow appropriate.

Clara walked confidently among the groups, aware that she was being observed. The coronation would take almost a week to trace its arc from its funereal beginning through the formal ascension of Aster to his father’s throne and then back down to celebrations and feasts. It wasn’t the most important series of court events of the year so much as of the generation. Alliances made and broken here would set the course of the empire for decades to come. Certainly for more then her own lifetime. Clara was curious to see which groups would be most open to her, which cool and polite, which unwelcoming.

Her expectation was that her association with the army and the bankers, the return from exile of Barriath, and the suspicion—well founded, it was true—that she’d somehow carried on Dawson’s vendetta against the spider priests after his failure would give her the whiff of brimstone that would keep all but the most adventurous from her company. She was prepared to be politely shunned.

She could hardly have been more mistaken.

“Is it true, my lady,” Lord Emming said, “this nonsense that Lord Issandrian’s spouting about the farmer’s council?”

Curtin Issandrian’s nod to her was a thing of subtle gratitude. As if she alone had engineered his return to polite society after the joint catastrophes of Feldin Maas’s conspiracy with Asterilhold and Geder’s rise to power.

“Excuse me, Lord Emming,” she said. “Which nonsense precisely?”

“Emming here was arguing that the farmers would have released the Timzinae slaves out of loyalty to the crown,” Issandrian said.

“We can’t begin to lower the dignity of the throne,” Emming said. “Especially now. Farmers? Your good husband was against it, I think.”

My good husband, Clara thought. God, how strange the world could be. Geder had become a lord of darkness, and Dawson’s name resurrected as a champion of virtue. How little any of it had to do with the truth.

“I’m surprised that you feel loyal servants of the crown lack dignity,” Clara said, smiling. “With all that’s happened, I think it’s clear that loyalty to the Severed Throne is the highest of virtues.”

Emming’s smile widened. His gaze flickered about as if to see who might have heard her words. “Well said, Lady Kalliam. Very well said.”

She nodded to Issandrian and then to Emming, then stepped away, her heart strangely light. Her opinion was being sought by the counselors of the throne, and in public? She paused for a cup of white wine and a bit of twice-baked bread with melted cheese on it. She sat alone on a stone bench that overlooked the milling group as she ate.

Jorey and Sabiha stood at the end of the garden, arm in arm, speaking with a group their own age. She had to remember not to think of them as children. All were adults now, married and with children of their own. Jorey had the too-thin look of a man still recovering from desperate illness, but his smile was warm, and when he glanced at Sabiha, it was with a tenderness that Clara could only see as a good omen. Barriath was there too, wearing a uniform of naval cut, though without any markings to show his rank or position. He stood with Canl Daskellin, whose hair had gone entirely white since King Simeon’s death. They were smiling, and if she was reading Barriath’s hand gestures rightly, he was telling the story of how he and his impromptu pirate navy had bested Lord Skestinin. Lord Skestinin, who even now was making his way back from Northcoast, no longer an honored guest of King Tracian. Or, more accurately, of the Medean bank.

Everyone, it seemed, was anxious now to have been against Geder Palliako all along. Or at least to appear to have been. She expected that over the course of the season, the tales of who had been conspiring to carry Dawson Kalliam’s legacy would spread and elaborate. It would be difficult to argue her away from the center of the story, though. Her and her boys. Her fallen house. Her husband. That little of it was true and what was hadn’t seemed at all as clean and clear at the time only meant it was history, she supposed. Playing the loyal traitor would be a fashion for a year or two, until the next thing came along. Or the people who despite everything still believed in the spider goddess felt safe enough to show themselves again.

Barriath laughed, shook Daskellin’s hand, and made his way over to her. Clara lifted a hand to him, and he kissed it as he sat at her side. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright.

“You’ve had some news,” she said.

“A bit,” Barriath said. “Just a bit.”

Barriath grinned at her, barely able to control himself but enjoying the chance to tease her curiosity. Clara lifted her brows and batted her eyelashes, a parody of a young coquette, and her son laughed. “Daskellin’s been in with Aster and Mecelli these last few days. Part of the coronation’s going to be a formal amnesty.”

“I’d hope so,” Clara said. “If there wasn’t an amnesty, half the men here would be honor-bound to kill you.”

“Not for me. For Father. This time next week, I’ll be Baron of Osterling Fells.”

Clara felt the air go out of her lungs. She put down the wine. “Barriath. That’s… that’s…” Wonderful. Absurd. Utterly confusing.

“We’ll have the holding by winter,” he said, “and the mansion here in the city. You won’t have to stay in that tiny place of Skestinin’s.”

“Or a boardinghouse,” Clara said, and her son laughed as if it were a joke. As if that weren’t something she’d done. A woman she had been. He went on, and she listened with half an ear. With the barony restored, Jorey would be expected to go to the priesthood, but with a military career already behind him and all the local cults in disarray after the disaster of the Righteous Servant, it seemed more likely he’d retire from service. At least until the next war came.

It was such exceptionally good news that Clara couldn’t understand why it landed on her heart with such weight. Her family restored. Her status regained. Her sons in places of honor and respect in the court. Her remaining sons. Her sons besides Vicarian.

You’ll become a joke in the court.… Can you imagine what that little girl’s life will be like if the name she took from you comes to carry the reputation for fucking the servants?

“Ah,” she said, the implications of Barriath’s news unfolding in her mind like a poisonous bloom.

Barriath’s brows knit, but only a little. “Ah?”

“Remembered something,” Clara said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing you need be concerned about.”

He rose and kissed her head, a gesture more informal than the gathering, but almost certainly it would be overlooked. “It’s a bad day for our enemies,” Barriath said.

“It is,” she said. For our enemies, and for others.

The sorrow and regret and deathly dread lay in her breast like a dead thing. Vicarian had been spider-ridden, but he hadn’t been wrong. Her dignity wasn’t only hers any longer. And Vincen…

She found quite suddenly that the company of the court was more than she could suffer. It wasn’t the others. They walked and ate and gossiped and fought just as they always had. It was only that she couldn’t do it. Not now.

Beside the garden, a thin artificial creek ran along its sculpted bed. Clara walked its murmuring length, pretending to admire the stonework and the statuary. She took out her pipe and filled it with leaf, struck it alight. The smoke tasted good. Familiar, at least. She would always have tobacco among her little pleasures.

The stream ended in a narrow grotto with benches around a rough stone god of some sort with several arms and two faces on his head. She didn’t know what it was meant to represent or who might have worshipped so odd and awkward a figure. She’d meant to sit alone for a time and gather herself there, but when she reached it, the benches were not empty.

Lehrer Palliako sat hunched forward, his elbows resting on his knees. The white-salt tracks of dried tears striped his cheeks, but his eyes were dry now. Dry and fixed and empty. Clara thought of retreat, stepping back unnoticed to give the man room for his grief. Before she could, he spoke.

“He was a good boy,” Lehrer said. “They don’t say it now, but he was a good boy. Smart. The books I have that he translated? There are some that don’t exist anywhere else in the world except for him. I never told him how proud I was.”

Clara came forward and sat at the man’s side. “Losing a child,” she said.

“Fuck losing a child. People lose children all the time,” Lehrer said. “I know that sounds small of me, but it’s true. People have lost their babies all through history. Fevers and fights and stupid accidents. No one’s ever lost my boy before. No one will again. It’s not the same.”

“It never is.”

“Never is,” he echoed. “Never.”

Clara took his hand, and for a moment, it was like holding a dead thing. Then his fingers twitched. How odd, she thought, that everyone, whatever they were, whatever wounds they left on the world, had someone who would mourn them. Someone who loved them and felt their loss.

“He died a hero,” Lehrer said. “Died saving the throne. Not that you’ll hear any of them say it.”

“I know,” Clara said. “It isn’t fair.” And, she didn’t add, I don’t know what would be. I’m not even sure that fairness is something we need more than mercy. Or forgiveness. Or freedom from the past.

Lehrer turned to look at her now. The whites of his eyes were marbled with red, and he swayed like a drunkard or a man collapsing from fatigue.

“I’d kill every damned one of them if it would bring my boy back,” he said. “Even you.” For a moment, she saw his son in him. She squeezed his fingers gently.

“I know,” she said.

Winning carried its own costs. She saw that now. Even when all went well, there were consequences. She could celebrate their success and still regret the price of it. To her, and to Vincen.

She dressed well to do the thing, as if her clothing were a kind of armor of the heart. As if the wound would come from outside her. She chose a cream dress in a formal cut they called old empire, though in truth it was hardly more than a generation old. It had been tailored to her new body, and it seemed too slight until the servant girl fastened the stays. Then she had her hair plaited into an ornate braid that pulled back and showed the grey at her temples. Her face had been roughened by the wind and the cold and the sun, by a season spent as a soldier. She sent the girl away and applied her powder and rouge herself. War paint for her final battle. The one she could only lose.