The Tyrant's Law

To Katherine and Scarlet

Prologue

Milo of Order Murro

Milo slipped in the darkness, falling to one knee. The stones of the beach cut his skin, and the blood darkened the oiled wool of his leggings. The old fisherman, Kirot his name was, paused and looked back at him, lifting his lantern and one white eyebrow in query. Are you coming, or staying here? To the north, the waves cracked with ice. To the south, the deep darkness of the village waited for their return. Milo forced himself to stand. A little more blood would do him no harm. He’d lost enough, God knew. Kirot nodded and turned back to the long, slow trudge along the shore.

The rhythm of their steps sounded against the waves like the complex patterns of a marriage dance. Milo could almost conjure up the thrill of the violins and the tapping of the shell drums. He had heard it said that of all the thirteen races of mankind, the Haaverkin had the most exquisite sense of music. In fairness, he’d only heard this said by other Haaverkin. A woman’s voice rose in the music, ululating in a sensual harmony with the strings, and Milo recognized that he was hallucinating. The voice of the water, his father called it. He’d heard it before sometimes when he’d been out on the boats in the dim light before dawn or limping back in to shore after a long day on the cold northern waters. Sometimes it was music, other times voices in conversation or argument. Some of the very old or very young claimed that the sounds were real, that they were the Drowned calling out to their brother race. Milo’s father said that was rot and piss. It was only a man’s mind playing tricks on itself, and the roar of ice and water to give it ground to play on. And so that was what Milo believed.

The coast nearest his village was ragged. Cliffs and stony beach, fat green crabs and snow-grey gulls. Some nights the aurora danced green and gold in the sky, but tonight it was low dark cloud and the smell of snow coming. The moon struggled now and again through the cover, peeping down at the two men and then looking shyly away. No, not two men. Not yet. One man and one nearly so. Milo had been a boy that morning, and would be a man before he slept, but he was still in the dangerous place between places, neither one thing nor another. It was why he was here.

He knew that the best thing was not to look directly into the glow of Kirot’s lantern. The tiny light would blind him. Better to stare into the shadows and leave his eyes adapted to the dark. But without his willing it, his gaze slid toward the flame, and he didn’t have the will left to pull it away. Of the hundreds of small fishing villages along the Hallskari coast, each had its order, its ritual, its secret and signs and mysteries. Bloody battles had raged between some for generations over disagreements whose origins were lost in the dark waters of history. Order Wodman, their faces tattooed in blue and red, sank the ships of the green-faced Order Lûs, and Order Lûs burned Wodman salting houses until the elder clan came from Rukkyupal to force a reconciliation. In some orders, to become a man meant a monthlong voyage in a boat of your own design. In others, the boys would fast until the great rolls of Haaverkin fat were reduced to thin folds of skin. For Milo and the boys of Order Murro, there was the initiation. A night of songs and coddling, a last chance to sleep in the women’s quarters, and then from dawn to dusk a series of ritual combats and beatings that left Milo’s back raw and his knees shaking-weak.

And after the last of these, the secret initiation about which no boy knew and no man would speak. Even now, all that Milo could say for certain was that it involved walking along the shore at low tide on the longest night of the year.

Kirot grunted and stepped to the left. Milo’s hazy mind failed to grasp why until he trod into the freezing puddle between the stones. The cold bit at his toes. Any of the other races—Firstblood, Tralgu, Yemmu, even the oil-furred Kurtadam—would have been in danger of death with a wet leg on a night like this. The dragons had made Haaverkin to survive the cold, and Milo only felt the wet as another insult to his dignity in a day rich with them.

Kirot heaved a great sigh, stopped, and took a bone pipe from his hat. He tamped tobacco into the bowl, took the stem between his rot-grey teeth, and leaned close to the lantern, sucking at the smoke like a baby at the teat. His face was a labyrinth of ink and age lines. When he looked at Milo, there was a solemnity in his expression that said wherever they had been bound for, they had reached. The old fisherman held out the pipe. Milo considered whether he should pretend to cough on the smoke. Boys weren’t allowed tobacco, though most of them found ways to sneak pinches of it from their fathers and older brothers. The bone bowl was warm, and Milo inhaled deeply, the glow of the embers like the bright eye of a Dartinae. It must have been the right thing, because Kirot smiled.

“Listen to me,” Kirot said, and hearing a voice that wasn’t swimming up from inside his own head startled Milo. “Of all the orders in all the villages of the Haaverkin, only ours knows the great secret of the world. You listening? There are things only we know.”

“All right,” Milo said.

“Josen, son of Kol. You remember him?”

Milo nodded.

“He wasn’t lost in a fouled net,” Kirot said. “He spoke of what you are about to learn outside the men’s circle. His own father killed him. Yours’ll kill you too, if you tell our secrets. What you learn here, no one ever knows, except us. Follow me?”

Milo nodded.

“Speak it,” Kirot said. “This isn’t time for being unclear.”

The warmth of the smoke cleared Milo’s head and soothed the aches in his flesh. He took another draw and exhaled through his nostrils. A particularly large wave roared against the stone shore, leaving spears and daggers of ice behind as it drew back into the ink-black sea.

“If I speak of what I learn here tonight, my life will be forfeit.”

“And no one will even know why,” Kirot said. “Not your mother. Not your wives, if you have any such. To everyone, it will have been sad mischance. Nothing more.”

“I understand,” Milo said.

Kirot stretched his broad shoulders, the joints of his spine cracking like snapped twigs.

“You know how it is, waking up from a good sleep?” Kirot asked. “You’re in some warm little dream about drinking goat’s milk with your dead aunt or some such nonsense, and then you come to, and it all fades away. Maybe if you were sick-tired to start or some dog’s started yapping in the night and woke you, you’re a little here and a little there at the same time. Don’t matter, though, because the dream that was all solid and real just ups and slides out of your mind. When the time comes to haul out for the day, and you can’t even say what it was you were dreaming about.”

Milo drew on the pipe again. His knees shook less and his back hurt more. A breath later, he noticed Kirot’s mildly annoyed gaze on him. Milo shook his head.

“Ask you again, and attend it this time. You know how it is, waking up from a good sleep?”

“I do.”

“Good, then. So that dream that fades? That’s the whole world. You, me. The sea, the sky. Every retching thing there is. It’s all a dream the dragons dream, and if the last dragon ever wakes up, we’re fucked. Everything that ever happened comes undone and cooks off into nothing.”

He said it in the matter-of-fact voice that belonged to conversations about weather and the odds of a good catch. Milo waited for the rest of the parable. Another wave rattled the stones and ice. In the dim light of the lantern, Kirot looked abashed.

“All right, then,” the old man said, turning his back to the sea. “No point waiting here. Come on.”

At first, Milo thought they were heading back to the village, and pleasure and disappointment fought for the greater share of his fatigue-drunk mind. Kirot didn’t lead him back toward the darkened houses, though. He took him to the cliffside. Centuries of tides had eaten at the hard stone of the land, sucking away soil and leaving the the bones of the world exposed. Caves and tunnels pocked it, pools of darkness within the darkness. Kirot led toward one, the lantern swinging at his side. Milo gave silent thanks that the man hadn’t asked for his pipe back.

The cave leaned into the land. Seaweed and driftwood choked the way forward, ready cover for crabs or ice snakes. Brine and rot thickened the chill air. Kirot raised the small lantern, muttered to himself, and waded forward, into the black. Milo followed. The cave sank deeper in, then turned and became a tunnel. The stone changed from pebbled brown and grey and black to an almost luminous green. Milo had seen a knife once made of dragon’s jade, unbreakable and permanently keen. This looked the same. A black line marked where the water stopped, even at high tide. Milo wouldn’t have thought they’d gone up enough for that, but his mind still wasn’t wholly his own. Perhaps he’d lost himself for a time somewhere in the tunnel. Perhaps the tobacco Kirot had given him had a few seeds of some less benign plant.

“Here,” Kirot whispered. “Look, but fuck’s sake keep quiet.”

He held out the lantern. The old man’s face looked grim and uncomfortable and as close as Milo had ever seen to fear. Anxiety snaked down past Milo’s exhaustion and pain as he reached out for the light. The iron handle scraped against his palm as he gripped it. Kirot nodded him on, then plucked the pipe from between Milo’s teeth and squatted down on his wide haunches as if ready to wait there in the darkness forever. Milo walked on.

The tunnel opened out into a larger chamber. Milo had been in any number of salt caves in his life, natural gaps where softer stone or mineral had been eroded away to leave holes in the flesh of the world. Once, he’d even found the remains of a smuggler’s camp: rotted steel blades and shattered pottery. The place he stepped into now bore those natural caverns no resemblance. The green walls were plumb and square, black lines carved into them in forms that made Milo’s skin crawl to look at. Black streaks bled down from holes where iron sconces had rusted to nothing timeless ages before. And before him, in the great room’s center, a statue of a dragon larger than a house. Its scales were the black of the midnight sea under layers of lichen and moss. The closed eyes were larger than Milo’s head, and the wide claws that rested on the ground could have covered his full body and left no sign that he was under them. Great wings lay folded against its sides.

Milo found himself weeping. He had no words to describe the commanding beauty of the thing before him or the ice-in-the-crotch terror that it inspired. He murmured an obscenity under his breath, and the carved dragon before him made it seem like a prayer. His heart fluttering in his breast, he reached out and put his hand against the broad scales.

Stone. Cold, hard, and dead.

He had heard that the great cities had such things. Images of dragons so old they’d been carved from living models, the impressions of massive claws, miraculous bestiaries and towers. He had heard of the great and mysterious ships that fishermen saw in the freezing mist that never came to shore. His world had always been filled with stories of miracles, but never the things themselves. Not until now. He let himself sit, his abused legs folding. The floor of the buried temple was cold and gritty, and the tears dripped down his cheeks, hot and utterly without shame. A warmth seemed to grow in his breast, a heat that came from having a secret. And more than that, from at last being a man. He imagined Kirot decades before, with his hair black and his face smooth, where he now sat. He imagined his father, his older brothers. All of them had carried the secret between them, and no amount of friendship, fondness, or loyalty could bridge that chasm. He had crossed over now. He knew what they knew. He was one of them now, not a child, but a man of Order Murro. And yes, it was a secret he would carry to his grave.

The lantern flame fluttered, and Milo noticed the greasy smell of the oil. He didn’t want to be caught in the darkness of the temple, trying to find his way back to old Kirot in the inky black. He rose, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. There needed to be something more. Some gesture that came from him, that made all of this his own.

“I will guard this secret,” he said, his thin voice echoing through the chamber. “No man alive will take it from me.”

He had a feeling of acceptance, almost of gratitude, radiating from the still stone before him. It was an illusion, of course, no more real than the voice of the water, but its unreality didn’t seem to matter. He would carry this moment with him, buried under the world with the sea at his back and the dragon before him, forever.

A sound came like the thunder of a gigantic wave, and Milo fell back. The great statue shifted, ripples passing along the expanse of its side, dust sheeting down. It shifted its foreclaws, raised its head, the vast mouth opening in a massive yawn. Within, the flesh of its mouth was wet and black, and the hot breath stank of oil and bit the air like the fumes from distilled wine. The massive head drooped, took a new position on its folded claws, and went still again. Milo heard something like a small girl’s laughter, high and small and paroxysmal, and knew it was him.

A hard-callused hand took him by the hair and pulled him back, another hand clamping down over his mouth and choking off his yelp. Kirot looked peeved; he scooped up the still-burning lantern and pushed Milo back down into the tunnel. Soon the walls around them grew soft and rounded again, and the cracking roar of the waves returned. When they reached the stone beach, Kirot stopped and lifted the lantern.

“I tell you that the world ends if the dragon wakes up,” the old fisherman said, “and to keep quiet, and what is it you do, boy?”

“Sorry.”

Kirot spat in disgust. When he spoke, his voice carried a full hold of contempt.

“Milo son of Gytan of Order Murro, I stand witness that you are now a man. Don’t let it go to your fucking head.”

Clara Annalise Kalliam, Formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells

Clara woke to the familiar sound of voices raised in the street below her window. The dawn had not yet transformed the darkness of her little room in the boarding house from black to grey, but it soon would. Her window was not glass, but oiled parchment that let in some light and a great deal of cold. She pulled the wool blankets close to her chin, pressed her body into the thin mattress, and listened while the married couple in the street berated one another again, as they did more mornings than not. He was a drunkard and a little boy in a man’s broken body. She was a shrew who drank a man’s blood and ate his freedom. He was sleeping with whores. She was giving all the coin he earned to her brother. The litany of marital strife was as common and boring as it was sad. And saddest of all, Clara thought, was that the two of them couldn’t hear the love on which all their resentments were built. No one shouted and wept in the street over someone they didn’t care about. She wondered what they would make of it if she sought them out and told them how very, very lucky they were.

When at last she rose, the light was enough that she could see the winter’s cold turning her breath to smoke. She got quickly into her underthings, and then a dress with stays up the side where she could reach them without a servant girl’s help. Under other circumstances, she would still have been wearing mourning clothes, but when one’s husband is slaughtered by the Lord Regent as a traitor to the throne, the rules of grief are somewhat changed. She made do with a small twist of cloth tied around her wrist and easily covered by her sleeve. She would know it was there. That was enough.

As the light waxed, she washed her face and put up her hair. The sounds in the street changed. The rattle of carts, the shouting of carters. Dogs barked. The sounds of Camnipol in the grip of winter. Dawson had hated being in the capital city during winter. Winter business, he’d called it, and his voice had dripped with contempt. A man of his breeding should spend the winter months on his lands or else with the King’s Hunt. Only now, of course, there were no lands. Lord Regent Geder Palliako had taken them back for the crown, to be doled out later as a token to someone whom he wished to reward. And Clara was living on an allowance scraped together by her two younger sons. Her eldest boy, Barriath, was gone God only knew where, and her natural daughter was busy clinging to her husband’s name and praying that the court would forget she had ever been called Kalliam.

In the common room, Vincen Coe sat by the fire, waiting for her. He wore his huntsman’s leathers, though there was no hunt to call in the city and the master he’d served was dead. The perfectly ridiculous love he professed for Clara shone in his eyes and in the uncertain way he held himself as she walked into the room. It wasn’t at all dignified, but it was flattering, and despite herself she found it endearing.

“I’ve saved you a bowl of the morning oats,” he said. “And I’m making fresh tea.”

“Thank you,” she said, sitting beside the little iron stove.

“May I be permitted to walk with you today, my lady?” It was a question he asked every day, like a child asking a favor of a beloved tutor.

“I would be quite pleased with some company, thank you,” she said, as she often did. Often, but not always. “I have several errands today.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vincen said, and did not ask what they were, because he knew.

She was going to overthrow the crown and, if she could, destroy Geder Palliako.

She didn’t have a concrete plan yet, but she’d lived her life in court. She had seen any number of quiet campaigns of social sabotage and destruction. The secret was no secret: build friendships and connections, talk about trivialities, and listen closely to what was said. The women who failed were always the impatient, the ones who tried to force others to their own opinion or engineer a false scandal. Making opportunities rarely worked, and watching for them almost always did.

Her first stop, as it had been most days, was a baker’s shop near the western edge of the Division. The baker was one of the few Yemmu to make a home in Camnipol, his body wide and thick, the tusks that rose from his lower jaw carved and inlaid with tribal markings of the Keshet. He looked like a curiosity in a show of exotics, but he spoke without an accent.

“Ah! The queen of pigeons! Come in, come in.”

Clara smiled, though in truth she thought the man’s pet name for her was a bit presumptuous.

“And how are you this morning, Melian? I hope your wife’s feeling better.”

“Much better, my lady,” the baker said, hoisting a cloth bag of stale rolls and yesterday’s small loaves from behind the counter. “I’ll tell her you asked.”

Clara’s allowance was generous without being extravagant. It would have kept her in much more comfortable conditions if she’d chosen to spend it differently. The smell of fresh bread was a temptation each day she came, rich and earthy, sweet with molasses and rich with baked walnuts. She pushed two thin coins across the countertop, and the baker brushed them into his wide and waiting palm.

“The pigeons eat well again today,” he said, grinning. Apart from his decorated tusks, his teeth were wide and yellowed by time and coffee.

“Perhaps this time they’ll be grateful,” Clara said with a smile as Vincen took up the bag and held the door open for her.

The streets were white with old ice where they weren’t black with mud. Low, bright clouds dropped balls of frozen rain the size of baby’s teeth, too compact to be called snowflakes and too soft for hail. The air smelled wet and cold. The great families were gone from the city for the season, but the traffic on the street was hardly less. The year that had passed had left a great deal of work to be done. The short, victorious war against Asterilhold and then the doomed, hellish revolt within the walls of the city. The process of rebuilding was evident in the streets. Carts with great timbers heading toward the north where noblemen’s compounds had burned. Great slabs of marble and granite creaking toward the palaces where walls and façades had been broken or scorched past cleaning. And even now, prisoners hauling debris—old barricades or ruined carriages or sometimes still the bodies of the lowborn dead—to the middle of the great bridges and dropping the garbage into the distant chaos at the bottom of the Division. The city as it had been was gone. Busy as a kicked anthill, Camnipol struggled to remake itself. Clara didn’t think much of what it was becoming.

The Prisoner’s Span was the southernmost of the great bridges that crossed the Division, and the oldest. Its design was plain, and the trunks of the massive trees that had been felled to create it were dark with tar to repel insects and keep the bridge from collapse. The wind bit and made the great structure creak like a ship at sea. The condemned of the city hung in cages below, great iron chains and thick straps of woven leather the only thing between the prisoners and the long fall below them. At the center of the span—as every morning—the prisoners’ families and friends gathered, trying to drop enough food and water down through the open air to keep the captives alive until their sentence ended. If a man was condemned without a wife or child who would come each day and lower down water and bread, then even a week’s detention was death. The crown felt no obligation to offer care for criminals. Clara had heard stories of brotherhoods of cutthroats and thieves that collected dues like any of the great fraternities, and guaranteed sustenance should their members fall afoul of the magistrate. She’d even seen some men on the span who might have been part of such a group. For the most part, though, it was family. Dirty, small women lowering baskets on twine. Desperate-eyed men dropping bits of cheese down to the opened palms of their wives and lovers. There were tales of someone leaning out too far, and the prisoners watching, trapped, as their saviors fell through the empty air to die far beneath them.

And then there were the others. Boys, mostly, who came to piss off the edge of the span or rain dead animals and rotten fruit on the heads of the prisoners. The city guard did nothing to stop them. Encouraged them, even. There were also tales of one of those boys losing his footing, but those weren’t told in the grim tones of tragedy.

Clara went from one end of the span to the other, slowly emptying her bag. Here was Shuler, the pickpocket’s wife, accepting yesterday’s roll for her half-frozen husband. Here Cassian the Tralgu, the tips of his doglike, mobile ears almost blue with the cold, come to visit his father in the cages. Here Berrin, whose sister had been caught witholding taxes. Here Taracali, whose son had killed a neighbor’s dog. Clara gave food to them all, stopping to talk to each of them, to learn their names and their stories, to touch them on the arm or the shoulder or the hand. She came as an agent of mercy, witnessing without judgment and sympathizing without pity.

And though they did not know it, she gathered them as allies.

When the bag was empty, Vincen folded it into his belt, and they walked together to the eastern end of the bridge, then turned north, toward the Kingspire. The streets widened and the architecture grew more ornate as they went on. Soon, she and Vincen were walking among the houses of the wealthy, and not long after that, the noble. Servants had cleaned the streets here, the black cobbles free of horse shit and old ice. Laborers’ carts made way for carriages and palanquins. The houses rose up three and four stories high, and the mansions had gardens and grounds of leaf-bare trees and brown hedge. Clara had spent most of her life in streets like these, riding in carriages and thinking nothing of it. It had only been months since she had been Baroness of Osterling Fells and wife of the Lord Marshal. Already, she felt like she was traveling in a foreign land. She stopped at a café and bought three chicken pies and a skin of watered wine, and the girl behind the counter pretended not to know her.

In the street again, Clara turned east. It would have been faster to go north, but the temple of the spider goddess that Geder Palliako had brought back from the Keshet stood on that street, and Clara didn’t want to see its red silk banner and eightfold sigil. It was the new priesthood’s influence over the throne that had driven Dawson to act, and his action that had unmade her life.

The first shout could have been anything—outrage, pleasure at seeing an old friend, a teamster scolding a horse. The second was unmistakably pain. She glanced at Vincen and he at her. Without a word, they turned down the narrow side street, moving toward a small crowd that had gathered in a private square. Vincen walked before her, leading with a gentle shoulder that permitted no refusal and gave little offense. She kept close to him, walking with her hand in his to keep the crowd from closing around him. Soon, they reached the front. Too soon.

The Timzinae girl wore the robes of a servant. The dark, chitinous scales that covered her body had been made darker by blood. She crouched on the curb, her head in her hands, and the man with the club standing behind her struck her again. He wore the gold and gilt armor of the Lord Regent’s private guard, and beside him, in brown robes, stood one of the priests. Clara looked around her at the faces in the crowd. Some were pale and horrified, but more seemed hungry. Excited.

“We can’t help, my lady,” Vincen Coe whispered in her ear. “If we tried, it would go worse for her. We should leave.”

Answer them, Clara begged the girl silently. Tell them what they want to know.

But the guardsman wasn’t asking questions, and the priest looked on impassively. Clara turned away, pushing through the crowd without Vincen’s help now. Her jaw ached. When they reached the main street again, her legs trembled with each step.

“Is it only me, do you think?” she asked. “Or does it seem this sort of thing is happening more often?”

“It’s the Timzinae, my lady. The story is that they were behind the trouble.”

“They weren’t,” Clara said with a mirthless laugh. “Dawson would have taken direction from a foreigner as soon as he answered to his own dogs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Vincen said.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s only … you said foreign, my lady. The girl back there was likely a born subject of Antea. There aren’t a great many Timzinae in Camnipol, and they keep to themselves, but they’re still from here.”

“You know what I meant.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had intended to be quiet then, to let her outrage turn inward and turn to something like resolve. She meant to walk down these streets that were no longer hers with head unbowed, and she meant to do it in silence. So when the words forced themselves from her throat, they had a broken sound, soft and low and unpleasant.

“What’s happened to us? Simeon gone. Dawson gone. What has happened to my kingdom?”

Vincen made a small sound in the back of his throat. As much as she hadn’t planned to speak, she doubly hadn’t hoped for him to answer. His voice was gentle and soft, almost mournful.

“Back at the Fells, there was a dog we had. Good hunter. Good nose. When the King’s Hunt came, he led the pack. Only, one time, the stag gored him. Took him in the belly and hoisted him in the air. We sewed him closed again, gave him time to heal up. He didn’t die, but after that, he ate himself. Started with the paws, just chewing them until they bled. We did everything we could to stop him. Wrapped him in bandages. Put bitter salve on his paws. Kept him in muzzle until his skin could heal. He was still a good hunter, and sweetest dog you could wish for, but he wouldn’t stop chewing himself raw. Sometimes shock does that.”

“And you think that’s what’s happening? The empire’s been hurt so badly that it’s biting itself to death?”

“Yes,” the young man said, and his tone made him sound older.

“And does that make me the tooth or the bitter salve?”

“Muzzle’s my bet, ma’am,” Vincen said. His smile bloomed sly. “Just haven’t figured how to strap it on the bastard yet.”

They passed by Lord Skestinin’s little compound. Its shutters were closed against the winter, and icicles as long as swords hung from the eaves. Jorey and Sabiha—her youngest son and his wife—were following the court for the season, and Skestinin himself spent his time with the fleet in the north. She missed her son, but for the time being it was best that Jorey establish himself without reference to his disgraced parents. She wasn’t so naïve as to trust the nobility of their blood to protect Jorey from being beaten in the streets if Geder Palliako’s favor should turn. Not in this new Camnipol.

Beyond the houses and compounds, the Kingspire rose. The stone looked dark against the winter sky, and the flock of pigeons that circled it seemed as insubstantial and grey as the snow through which they flew. Clara stood still, letting the traffic of the street pass her by. Her cheeks felt stiff with the chill.

By the time she reached the builder’s tents, the pies had cooled, but Clara didn’t let it concern her. The ruins had once been a stables and an open market, both burned the night the failed coup began. The charred wooden posts had been cleared away, the ground leveled, and new paving stones and supports were being raised. Piles of white brick stood as thick as two men and tall as three, soft wooden scaffolds clinging to the sides. Men in wool and thick workmen’s leather hauled handcarts filled with lime and reinforcing bars from one place to another. Their talk was rough and uneducated and nothing Clara hadn’t heard a thousand times in the servants’ quarters of her own house. It only took a few moments to find the face she sought.

“Benet! Here you are. I’ve been looking simply everywhere for you.”

“L-Lady Kalliam?” the boy said. Once, he had been a gardener’s assistant and plucked weeds from her flowerbeds. Now his hands were callused and his face pale with brick dust and starvation.

“Your aunt mentioned you’d taken work here, but of course the wages don’t begin until after you’ve done the work, do they? I thought I would just bring you a bit of lunch. You don’t mind, do you?”

The boy’s eyes went as wide as a Southling’s when Vincen put the food onto the stack of bricks at his side.

“I … that’s to say … Thank you, m’lady. You’re too kind.”

“Just trying to keep up with the old household,” Clara said, smiling. “It wasn’t any of your doing that things went the way they did. It seems wrong you should suffer for it. Eat, please. Don’t stand on ceremony, we’re well past that now. And tell me all about this … well, this whatever it is that you’re building.”

The tour was short. Benet was most concerned with the pie and not offending his overseer, but Clara took the general shape. Rooms of brick and floors of paving stone. Thin windows and wide corridors. The stables and the market were gone, and they would never return. What little remained of their bones would become the next layer of ruin upon which the city was built, age after age reaching down like rings in a tree. In place, the new barracks. That’s what they called it. Clara thought better.

That evening, her feet held up to the little iron stove, Clara ate one of the remaining pies and Vincen the other. Abatha Coe—Vincen’s cousin and proprietor of the house—bustled about her chores with a sour expression and the smell of boiled cabbage. The young Firstblood man who’d taken a room on the lower floor near the back came and complained of a leaking window. The Cinnae girl, thin and pale as a sprout, came in from whatever she’d done with her day, took a bowl of the house stew, and retreated to eat in solitude. Clara smoked her little clay pipe and she brooded. Vincen, loyal as a hound, gave her her silence as long as she wanted it, and broke it with her when she was ready.

“That dog,” she said. “The one that had the trouble biting himself. Whatever became of him?”

Vincen opened the stove’s grate and dropped in a knot of pine. The firelight danced over his face. He looked melancholy and beautiful and young. A wholly inappropriate man.

“Not all dogs can be saved, ma’am,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I thought not. Those buildings that Benet and others are toiling at. They aren’t barracks.”

“Looked more like kennels to me,” Vincen agreed, but Clara shook her head.

“No, not kennels,” she said. And then, “Why, do you suppose, is Geder Palliako building prisons?”

Lord Regent Geder Palliako

The stag stood in a clearing, surrounded by the hunting pack. Its eyes were wide with fear, and foam dripped from its lips. The barking and baying almost drowned out the calls of the huntsmen. Beyond the dogs, the men of the hunt sat astride their horses. Snow greyed the leather hunting armor and thick wool cloaks, clinging to the noblest men of Antea like moss on a stone. All eyes were on Geder; he could feel them.

The huntsman who handed him the spear was a Jasuru, bronze scales and sharp black teeth. Geder took the spear in hand, set it. It was heavier than he’d expected it to be. It’s like a joust, he told himself. Just a little practice joust with a stag for the target. I can do this.

He glanced at Aster, and the prince’s gaze encouraged him. Geder forced himself to smile, then leaned forward and charged. His horse ran as smooth as a river under him, and it seemed to him that he didn’t draw nearer the stag so much as the beast grew larger. The impact jarred his arm and wrenched his shoulder. He felt himself rising up out of the saddle, and for a horrified moment, falling into the chaos of dogs and churned snow and blood seemed inevitable. The stag screamed. The spear’s point hadn’t pierced him through, but skidded along the flank. A wide fold of skin and flesh hung down, blood pouring from it. The antlers swung toward Geder, preparing for a counterattack, and the huntsman made his call. A dozen arrows flew, striking the stag in its thick neck, its side, the meat of its leg.

The stag stumbled forward, lost its footing, and fell to its knees. Its breath came solid as smoke. Geder looked down at the black eyes, and there seemed to be an intelligence there. And a hatred. Blood gouted from the animal’s mouth and it lowered its head to the snowy clearing. The cheer rose from the hunters, and Geder lifted his hand, grinning. It hadn’t been an elegant kill, but he hadn’t humiliated himself.

“Who takes honors?” Geder asked as the huntsmen came forward to prepare the corpse for its unmaking. “Daskellin? You were up toward the front. Who caught up to the thing first?”

Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch, bowed in his saddle and gestured to his left.

“I believe it was Count Ischian, Lord Regent. I was close behind, but he outran me.”

Geder shifted in his saddle. Count Ischian bowed in his saddle. He was an older man, his colors blue and gold, and he was related by blood to half a dozen houses at court. His holdings, however, were in Asterilhold. In the war just past, he had fought on the other side. His loyalty now was unquestionable. He had faced Geder’s private tribunal, and the gift of the goddess had certified his honesty. But giving full honors in the King’s Hunt to someone who’d been an enemy when last year’s hunt had run seemed wrong.

“Even honors to you both, then,” Geder said. “And well done. Now let’s get back to the holding before we all turn into ice sculptures of ourselves.”

Geder had rarely taken part in the hunt before he’d been in the center of it. He had risen from heir to the Viscount of Rivenhalm to Lord Regent of Antea so quickly, there hadn’t been time to accustom himself to the circles of power and influence. Even now, as the most powerful man in the empire, he felt a bit outside of things. Many of the men on the hunt had been riding together since they were children younger than Aster, and while Geder might command their loyalty, he couldn’t insist on their friendship. Add to that the fact that many of the great houses had risen up against Geder only months before and were now gone forever. Sir Alan Klin, Geder’s nemesis, was feeding the worms at the bottom of the Division now. Lord Bannien was rumored to have been richer than the crown itself, and he was imprisoned now, his family broken, his titles stripped from him, and his private treasury funding the reconstruction of Camnipol. Dawson Kalliam, Geder’s patron and father of Geder’s best friend, had been the Lord Marshal of the war against Asterilhold, and then the soul and center of the uprising. Had things gone differently, it would have been Lord Kalliam who rode down the stag in that clearing, and Geder who lay in a traitor’s grave. Jorey Kalliam rode with the hunt, but even after his disavowal he seemed darkened by his father’s crimes. And now, with conquered Asterilhold being joined into a greater empire, there came the awkwardness of befriending those who had recently been enemies.

The death of the king, the naming of Lord Regent, a successful war, and a scarring insurrection. Imperial Antea had suffered a terrible year. And the coming spring might be no easier.

Namen Flor’s lands sat nestled in a valley in the southeast of the empire, not far from the border with Sarakal. The great city of Kavinpol lay to the west with its river docks and warehouses. In summer, the the rich soil of Flor was fed by two rivers, and the grain and fruit that came from that one holding would feed an army for a season. The holding itself rose like a mountain in the plain, granite and basalt hauled overland from the mountains to the south and combined into a building almost as tall as the kingspire in Camnipol. The dragon’s road ran through the heart of the structure, though at the moment ice and snow buried the eternal jade, so that it might have been any road at all until they had passed through the wide gates and under the overhanging shelter.

The cold had set Geder’s nose running, and his earlobes hurt like something bitten. He gave his horse to the groom and hurried to the quarters Sir Flor had set aside for his use. And especially the tub. It was beaten copper half as deep as a man standing, and the water that fed into it from the stone dragon’s mouth steamed and smelled of sandalwood. And best of all, the room that housed it was small. As Lord Regent, custom had it that his personal guard and body servants would be always in attendance. He hated it, and while he’d won the battle against the body servants, he hadn’t quite had it in him yet to keep the guardsmen out when he bathed. After Dawson Kalliam’s attempt on his life, Geder actually found the guards reassuring in a way. But here the private bath could be protected from without, and Geder’s nakedness wouldn’t be on display even to those whose duty it was to defend his life.

While he let the warm water ease the aching muscles in his back and thighs, he watched the lamp flame shift and steady and shift again. He let himself imagine what it would have been like to have a certain part-Cinnae banker woman sitting across from him, her flesh as bare as his own, her pale skin glowing in the light. When his body began to react to the thought, he made himself turn to other matters.

From without, the King’s Hunt had always struck Geder as merely a vehicle for court intrigue. King Simeon would travel the realm, gracing his friends and allies with his presence, killing a few animals, and having a lot of feasts. It had looked like one of the sort of parties Geder was bad at, only stretched out over the course of weeks and punctuated by feats of manly athletics, half-drunken poetry contests, and extemporaneous speeches. Only when he’d become Lord Regent and the empire was his to command did he begin to see how the hunt was also a tool of convenience.

Not all men of court came to Camnipol. Not all facts of a landscape could be captured on a map. The hunt might seem to wander through the lands and holdings of the empire, but the path he followed was as set and certain as the dragon’s roads themselves. It was not chance that had brought him here, but necessity.

He rose from the water, dried himself, and put on his undergarments before signaling to the body servants that they could enter to finish dressing him. He would have been as happy staying the rest of the day in the warmth and solitude, but the feast was coming, and now that he’d spent some time in the forests near Flor, it was time to attend to the matter that had actually brought him there.

He found Basrahip and Aster sitting together in a withdrawing room. The walls were papered in red velvet and the lamps burned with the rich scent of whale oil. The priest’s voice rolled and thundered like thunder from a distant storm. The young prince in his silk and cloth-of-gold sat looking up into the face of the massive brown-clad priest like an allegory of youth at the feet of wisdom. Geder stopped in the doorway to listen.

“Seeing that the world had fallen from his hands, Morade, in his death, was possessed by the sick pride of his kind. He released a terrible weapon. For three years, the world burned. Every forest fell to ash. Every city crumbled. The thirteen races of humanity took refuge where they could, preserving the animals in pens and the fish in clay pots against the day when they might be freed to fill the world again.”

“Three years?” Aster said, awe in his voice.

“Yes, young prince. For three years, all was laid waste. And so the freedom of humanity was born in ashes and in starvation. Only the Timzinae, favored of the dragons, kept the old ways alive, sacrificing children of the other races to the memory of the Dragon Empire. All others remade themselves, replanting the forests and rebuilding the cities. And without the guidance of the goddess, all lost their way, as the goddess had known they would. She kept aside the temple in the mountains in the lands of the Sinir that are holy to her, that we could prepare for the day when a great man would come and we would know it was time to reenter the world.”

“That was Geder, wasn’t it?” Aster said.

“It was,” Basrahip said, with a broad, gentle smile.

“Speaking of which,” Geder said, stepping into the room. Aster turned to him. He looked stronger, healthier since they’d taken to the hunt. Geder would still see moments of sorrow in the boy, but they were growing fewer and fewer. Whenever Geder worried about it, he reminded himself that Aster had lost his father not a full year ago, and that even the most resilient child would mourn a parent for much longer than that.

“Prince Geder,” Basrahip said, levering himself to his feet.

“Lord Regent,” Geder said. “Aster’s a prince. I’m Lord Regent.”

“Of course,” Basrahip said, as he always did. The correction would never take.

“Is everything all right?” Aster said.

“Yes, fine,” Geder said. “But I need to borrow Basrahip for a time. Before the feast starts.”

“Of course, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said with a bow. When Geder rolled his eyes, Aster chuckled.

Geder and Basrahip walked together down the long hallways. Here, in the heart of the holdfast, the ceilings rose up higher than four men one atop the other, and a clever series of holes admitted the falling sunlight without letting the warmth of the braziers escape. The color of the light was enough to tell Geder that the winter night would be on them soon. Servants and guards went before and came behind, creating a mobile privacy for him and Basrahip.

“That can’t be right, can it?” Geder said.

Basrahip raised querying eyebrows.

“The three-year fire,” Geder explained. “A fire that went on that long would have left a layer of ash all over the world. And there are cities that stood where they are now since before the dragons fell.”

“If it must be, it must be,” Basrahip said. “But the fire years are truth.”

“But there are forests in Northcoast that have trees older than that. Not many, maybe, but I read an essay about how you can tell the age of a tree by the number of rings, and it said the largest of the redwoods in Northcoast—”

Basrahip shook his bull-wide head.

“You put too much faith in empty words. No forests live that were not planted after the fire years. All animals that live were sheltered by humanity in the fire years. If you say that the world must be built upon ash, then look for it, and you will find it. Or if you do not, you must find for yourself what became of it. But the fire is true.”

“It’s just in all the histories I’ve read—even the ones written within a generation or two of the fall—no one’s ever mentioned a catastrophe like that. You’d think they would have. I mean, the utter destruction of everything’s not the sort of thing I’d leave out if I were writing a history.”

Basrahip waved the words away with a massive palm.

“Words on paper are not even lies. They are empty. The voice that speaks them is your own, and you mean nothing when you say them except that here on this page are these words. It the least important thing that there is. From the time before the dragons, my priesthood have been the keepers of truth. All truth. You know that no one can lie to the goddess.”

“Well, yes,” Geder said, feeling abashed. “Of course I know that. I mean, you’ve proved it over and over, haven’t you?”

“And you know that her truth cannot be long denied.”

“I’ve seen that too,” Geder agreed.

“With every generation, the priests of the goddess have passed on the true tale of the world in voices that cannot be denied to acolytes who would hear any falsehood. What are your books and scroll to this? The living voice has carried what I say across the ages. Your library was all created by a hand, not a voice. Tell me this. Will you say all books are true?”

“Well, no. Of course not. There are some essays I’ve read that were clearly—”

“And would you say that you can know perfectly which are true and which not?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. I mean, most of them, you can assume are—”

Basrahip stopped, took Geder by the shoulders, and looked deeply into his eyes.

“I ask you this, Prince Geder. If I gave you a meal that you knew was poisoned in part, and also you knew that you could not know where the poison lay, would it be wisdom to eat?”

“Of course not,” Geder said.

“So it is with books,” Basrahip said. “Listen to my voice, my friend. The goddess is there, and she will not lead you astray.”

Namen Flor looked like a reed. His thin body rose up from his feet to a tall, broad face and hair the color of wheat that he wore close-cropped. He stood as Geder entered the candle-bright private chamber. If he was nervous, his voice did not betray it.

“I was told you wished to speak with me, Lord Regent?”

“Yes, I did. Please, sit. No need to be formal. You know Minister Basrahip, don’t you?”

Sir Flor bent his head in a gesture carefully between nod and bow. Physical diplomacy. Geder lowered himself to a divan upholstered in green silk and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Basrahip took a place on the far wall, smiling absently and looking at at the fire dancing in the grate. Flor turned from one to the other, then sat across from Geder and ignored the priest. Geder glanced at Basrahip, and the priest nodded once. He was ready.

“Are you loyal to me, Sir Flor?”

The reedy man seemed to expect the question, because he answered at once.

“Of course, Lord Palliako.”

Basrahip nodded. It was truth, but Geder held up a finger.

“I don’t mean to the throne or to Antea in the abstract. Are you loyal to me?”

Flor frowned.

“Forgive me, my lord, but I don’t see the difference. You are Lord Regent. Being loyal to Antea is being loyal to you.”

Another nod. Well, it wasn’t as good as raw personal devotion, but it would do.

“I have need of your discretion, Sir Flor. How are your spring crops?”

“Not yet sown. I imagine they will be breaking the ground for the first lettuces in a month or so.”

“I would like you to convert your fields to spring wheat. And whichever lands you can spare that are least productive, I will need to borrow from you for the season.”

Flor blinked, then shrugged.

“Of course, my lord. May I ask why?”

Geder leaned back. The truth was, he enjoyed this part. Knowing something another man wanted to know was a kind of power. Maybe the best kind.

“Antea is in perilous times,” Geder said. “The impression abroad is that the trials of the war and the insurrection have weakened us. That we may be vulnerable. As long as the world thinks we are weak, we will be in danger.”

“Yes, I have heard that concern spoken,” Flor said. “And I admit I am concerned that it may in part be true. The forces need to keep Asterilhold from rising—”

“It will not rise,” Basrahip said. “There are temples to the goddess in both its great cities. It will follow Prince Geder.”

“You have heard that Dawson Kalliam was advised by Timzinae?” Geder said. “That before he began his conspiracy, he met with a dozen Timzinae men?”

“I’d heard rumors.”

“It’s common knowledge,” Geder said with a wave of his hand. “Sarakal and Elassae are the nations under the control of Timzinae leaders. The enemies of the empire expect our attention to be in the north and west. That our border with Sarakal will be lightly defended, and weak. They are mistaken. I require your spare field to build a temporary encampment for an army. And the wheat as bread for men and fodder for horses.”

Flor’s face went pale, picturing the expense and the burden to his lands a free garrison would bring. To the man’s credit, he raised no objection.

“For how long will we be hosting the army?”

“Not long. Two weeks, maybe three. However long the Lord Marshal decides it’s needed. Then they’ll be off.”

“To keep the border?”

“To cross it,” Geder said.

Cithrin bel Sarcour, Voice of the Medean Bank in Porte Oliva

Cithrin stood at the boat’s prow. The sea stretched out before her in the early morning light, white and pink and blue as if it had been remade from mother-of-pearl. The air was thick with the scent of brine and tar, the creak of wood and rope. She wore a black wool cloak wrapped tight, its hood raised to cover her straw-white hair. She held her chin high, her gaze soft. To the captain or one of the sailors or one of her own guard, she would appear to be a woman at the height of her power, occupied in the privacy of her thoughts. In truth, she’d drunk too much the night before, and her head felt like a sparrow had built a nest in her skull.

On the horizon, the land was little more than a thickening of the water. From the time she had left Birancour, it had remained the same, a darkness to port. Once they had passed into the Inner Sea, it would have been in theory faster to lose sight of the shore, strike out from the straits that divided the Free Cities from Lyoneia, and make a short blue-water transit to Elassae and Suddapal. But speed was not everything, and even on the relatively gentle waters, winter storms could rise, and the option of finding shelter in a cove or harbor was not to be dismissed lightly. There had been troubles along the way: one of the sailors had slipped from the mast and broken his leg so badly that he’d been lost in a fever since; for two long days they had run from dark-sailed pirates before the thieves gave up the chase; and Roach had been nauseated for so long that the dark chitinous plates of his arms had begun to bend and crack as the flesh beneath them thinned away. On some day, indistinguishable from the ones before and behind it, they had sailed past Newport and the ruins of Vanai where her childhood lay in ashes. And the nearer they drew to the five cities of Suddapal, the more the anxious knot in her belly grew, and the harder it became to sleep. The anxiety built day after day, hour upon hour.

Until now.

The calls of the sailors changed. The ship shifted under her feet. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the dark line of land thickened and took on shape. Hills and valleys, and then the more regular forms of buildings. And then reaching out to her like a thousand fingers, the piers with their forest of masts. Suddapal, the fivefold capital city of Elassae, and home of the farthest-flung branch of the Medean bank.

“We’ll have you to land by midday, Magistra,” the captain, an old Firstblood man with a patchy white beard said. “There’ll be the matter of the last part of the payment to consider?”

Cithrin smiled.

“As soon as we’re in port, Captain,” she said.

“Might as well now,” he said. “We’ve time.”

“Policy,” she said, as if the word explained and excused everything. She turned back toward the growing city and wished she’d had less wine in the night.

Her agreement with Komme Medean had called for a year’s apprenticeship, and they had agreed before she left on the long winter journey south from Carse that Suddapal would be the best place. Komme Medean’s letters would have reached Magistra Isadau weeks before, but Cithrin had no way to know what the woman would think of the arrangement. Any greeting could be waiting for her on the docks. Or even a refusal.

The sailors scrambled behind her, and the little ship turned its nose to the shore. The noise of the sails as they caught the breeze deafened. A guide boat raced out to meet them, hardly more than a canoe with three Timzinae youths hauling on red-dyed oars. Timzinae had been as common as Firstblood in Vanai, and the young men’s dark bodies and shining scales comforted her.

“Magistra,” Yardem Hane said from just behind her. She turned, craning her head up toward the Tralgu’s broad dog-like face. His expression was impassive, but the tall, mobile ears were canted forward, toward the shore. “We’ve packed the chest.”

“And last payment?”

Yardem patted his hip where his leather wallet hung from his belt, the sound of coins hardly carrying over the din. “I’ll take care of it. Enen and Roach will see to the rest.”

Cithrin nodded, her eyes following the laughing gestures of the guide boat crew. Their canvas pants and rough shirts seemed too light for the cold of the winter sea, but any discomfort they felt was hidden by their boisterous shouts and friendly profanity. She envied them. She had more money than they would likely see in a decade and had commanded control of a hundred times that, but the ease with which she held her body and the calmness of her affect were all the fruit of study and artifice.

Leaving Porte Oliva had been harder than she’d expected. The white buildings and winter mists, the street dogs and the little café where she had leased the back room, the wide square between the Governor’s Palace and the grand temple where the guests of the magistrate’s justice served out their punishments. All of it was gone now. Even Pyk Usterhall, officially the notary of the Porte Oliva branch and in truth its voice in all but name, carried a weight of fond nostalgia for Cithrin now, and she disliked Pyk as much as she did anyone breathing air. The only familiar faces were the guards she chose as her companions. Enen because the woman was old, uncompromising, and as hard as last week’s bread. Roach because he was the only Timzinae among the bank’s guard, and having someone who might pass for a local could only be to her advantage. And Yardem Hane, because he was Yardem and because Captain Wester had quit while she was in Camnipol. He’d vanished into the world without so much as a farewell. He’d given no explanation of his decision to leave, left no note or letter behind for her. She told herself that his departure hadn’t stung, but she wasn’t quite able to convince.

But even without Marcus, Porte Oliva had been the first home she’d made for herself. She had founded the branch of the Medean bank there without in fact even consulting with the bank’s holding company. Her rooms there were familiar and comfortable, the servants at the taphouse down the street knew her and her habits, the queensmen who kept order in the streets touched their brows in respect as she passed by. In Porte Oliva, she had been someone, and more, she understood who and what she was. In Suddapal, she might be anyone. And so she might be nobody.

Her stomach made a little flutter, and she wished that she had a little skin of wine. Preferably distilled.

The piers of Suddapal reached out deep into the waters of the Inner Sea. The planks were black, slippery, and flecked with foam. At the height of a shipping season, Cithrin imagined they would be as full and crowded as the beggar-press walking into Porte Oliva, and she was pleased to have arrived when she could keep herself far away from the churning green of the sea against the pilings. The waves seemed to shift the boards under her feet, the world rolled unsteadily, and she knew it was an illusion of stepping back on land. Any pier that truly swayed so much would come to pieces in a day.

A Timzinae woman stood before a palanquin of red and gold, and two massive Yemmu men with uncut tusks rising from their jaws knelt behind her. Her robes were a vibrant green that would have left Cithrin looking wan and sickly. A necklace of gold splayed itself on her throat. Cithrin put on a smile, tucked her hips the way Master Kit had taught her to make herself seem older, and walked to the woman. The Timzinae smiled, the nictitating membrane sliding over her eyes, blinking and unblinking.

“Magistra bel Sarcour?” the woman asked.

“Magistra Isadau, I presume?” Cithrin said.

“Oh, no. Isadau is my sister. She’s folded into some business or other. I am Mykani rol Ennenamet, but please call me Kani.”

Behind her, Yardem snapped out a sharp order. Enen replied, her voice respectful and unintimidated. Cithrin found herself on the wrong foot, trying to readjust her expectations of Magistra Isadau and her bank.

“I wasn’t aware that the Magistra had family,” Cithrin said, and Kani’s laughter shimmered.

“There seem like a thousand of us sometimes, but we don’t all live in the compound. Just me, Isadau, and our brother Jurin. And the children, of course.”

“Magistra Isadau has children?” Cithrin said. She tried to imagine Magister Imaniel with a wife and children of his own. It was as easy to picture a house cat juggling knives.

“Not of her own,” Kani said, “but I have my girls, and Jurin is raising three boys. We have the household to herd them, though. They’re all looking forward to meeting you. In fact, I should warn you. Jurin’s oldest boy, Salan, just turned twelve. He saw a company perform a play last year about a Cinnae queen who saves Herez from a plague of demons.”

“The Ash Burner’s Tale,” Cithrin said.

“Yes, I think that was the name. Regardless, the woman playing the queen was quite beautiful, and I think he’s decided to fall in love with you on that basis. If his mooning around gets bothersome, let one of us know and we’ll rein him in somehow. You know how boys that age are with their doomed infatuations.”

I haven’t got a clue, Cithrin thought, but didn’t say. How are they?

“We’re ready, Magistra,” Yardem said. His ear flicked, and the earrings jingled. Kani’s attention fastened on them.

“Priest caste?” she said.

“Fallen,” Yardem said.

“Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“No offense taken,” Yardem said. Kani’s smile stayed warm, but a reevaluation showed in her eyes.

“You are a fascinating woman, Magistra bel Sarcour. It should be delightful having you in the family,” Kani said. The repetition of her formal name and title made Cithrin realize she’d been rude.

“Please, if I’m to call you Kani, you should call me Cithrin.”

Kani made a small, playful bow, then scooped Cithin’s arm into her own and led her toward the palanquin. The two Yemmu men coughed to one another and hunkered down, ready to lift Cithrin and her new companion and carry them into the city.

“Cithrin,” Kani said. “That’s a beautiful name. Was it your mother’s?”

The five cities that made up Suddapal stretched along the northern coast of the Inner Sea. Along the eastern side, black cliffs rose. Islands towered a hundred feet above the waves, topped by tiny houses and greenswards where sheep spent their whole lives without ever cropping the mainland’s grass. Farther to the west, the docks and piers stretched out to sea, and streets and squares pressed up into the hills. There were no canals as there had been in Vanai. Many of the streets were stone-paved, but in others, a low, tough ground cover grew on the soil, resisting horses’ hooves and carts’ wheels alike. The puppets and singers that had seemed to spring up on every corner of Porte Oliva were gone. Timzinae children played, running alongside the palanquin, chanting rhymes that Cithrin couldn’t quite follow in harmonies that were as complex as the most sophisticated singers she’d heard in the temples. Here and there, she caught glimpses of other races—Yemmu, Tralgu, Firstblood—but for the greatest part, Suddapal was a Timzinae city, and Cithrin realized that her skin, hair, and stature would stand out there like a daisy among roses. Just another thing to consider as she remade herself here. The year ahead seemed to stretch out forever.

Magister Imaniel had always taught her that a bank’s public face should be humble. Architecture that boasted was better left for kings and princes and priests. A small house, clean and simply run, told the mechanisms of power that the bank was no threat to them, and since that was not true, the appearance of it was all the more important. In Porte Oliva, Cithrin had taken an old gambler’s stall for the home of her branch, and had conducted business in Maestro Asanpur’s café. When the guard grew large enough to require a barracks of their own, she hadn’t moved to larger quarters, but taken other places. Other sites. As her power in the city grew, she took pains to appear small even to the people who knew better. Especially to them.

The Medean bank in Suddapal, in contrast, was in a broad, sprawling compound as grand and pleasant as a duke’s holding. Halls of polished granite with statues of gods and holy men, monsters and angels in niches at every corner. A massive pasture adjacent with stables enough for a dozen horses. A slave to greet them wearing a decorative silver chain that wasn’t even attached to the doorframe. Pillars of carved wood and the scent of pine smoke. If this was how a bank remained unnoticed, humble, and small, then Suddapal had to be the richest city in the world. Cithrin felt certain that it wasn’t.

The strangest thing about it all was the openness of the space, the absence of glass or parchment over the windows. The building itself seemed exposed to the air and weather in a way she had never seen before. She wasn’t sure it was wise.

Her own room had a black iron stove squatting in the corner with a fire already burning in its belly. Fresh rushes covered the floor. Her bed was square with a soft mattress, a blanket filled with down, and a pillow stuffed with buckwheat hulls. A washing basin of carved stone topped an iron stand at the bedside, and an enameled night pot waited discreetly beside it. The desk was made from carved oak, stained almost black. The window opened onto a courtyard, and the voices of a man and woman carried to her. The hall just outside had a guard’s niche where Enen sat. With a Kurtadam’s thick pelt, the cool hallway might be almost comfortable.

Cithrin had hardly changed into fresh clothes and washed her face when a gentle tapping came at the door.

“Magistra Isadau’s come,” Enen said.

Cithrin squared her shoulder, put on her best imitation of an older woman, and opened the door. Magistra Isadau, voice of the Medean bank in Suddapal, was slender with flecks of gray at her temples and the first dusting of frost on the scales of her face and neck. Her gown was simple cotton, embroidered with flowers and vines, and she held a small green pot in her hands with what looked like a windblown pine in miniature.

“Magistra Cithrin,” the woman said, extending the little tree. “Welcome to my home.”

The pot was heavier than it looked. Cithrin put in on the corner of the desk with a distinct clunk. The tiny boughs shivered as if blown by an unseen wind.

“Thank you. Please come. Sit.”

Isadau smiled and sat on the corner of the bed, leaving the desk’s chair to Cithrin. Her eyes flickered, considering Cithrin without judgment.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said, wondering what the head of the Medean bank had said about her, and whether she could find out. “I’m not sure how much Komme Medean said.”

“It wasn’t only Komme. Mani mentioned you too, one time and another.”

It took Cithrin a moment to realize Isadau meant Magister Imaniel. She’d never considered that the two heads of Medean branches so physically near one another must have also known each other, or that Magister Imaniel would have spoken about the girl who was only the ward of his bank. Her past had always been entirely her own, and her first and unconsidered response to sharing it was resentment.

“I see,” Cithrin said. “Well. I hope it was all positive.”

“Most was, yes,” Isadau said. “Komme wrote that he saw a bit of Mani in you. I can too. You speak the way he did.”

“I grew up with him.”

“That can’t have been easy. Komme also said you had the best mind for banking he’s seen in a generation. A wild talent still, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. The phrase was bold without being reckless and reckless without being stupid. He can be a bit of a poet when he’s in a good mood,” Isadau said, then her forehead narrowed. “I have to ask. Did you really boast to the king of Northcoast that you’d bedded the Antean Lord Regent?”

Cithrin felt the blush growing in her neck.

“I wouldn’t call it boasting. They weren’t listening to me,” Cithrin said. “Geder Palliako and I were in close quarters for weeks. All they’d ever managed was a few meetings and letters. I wanted them to understand that I knew the man better than they did.”

“And that you’d lain him was proof of that?”

“I might have phrased it for effect,” Cithrin said

Magistra Isadau’s laughter was warm and delighted, and Cithrin felt the knot in her belly loosen a notch.

“Well, no one can call you timid.”

“I don’t know I’d say that. I was annoyed with them,” Cithrin said. Then, a moment later, “Did Komme say anything else about me?”

“That your heart hadn’t died yet,” Isadau said, her tone precisely as it had been before, “but that it was in danger of it.”

Now Cithrin laughed, but it was a nervous sound even to her. In the courtyard, someone called out, a woman or a child. Magisra Isadau lifted a finger.

“May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Cithrin said.

Isadau gestured with her chin to the tiny plant on the desk.

“Why did I bring that to you?”

Cithrin considered, chewing the inside of her lip. For a moment, she was a child again, sitting at evening meal with Magister Imaniel and Cam and Besel, answering question after question. It came to her as easily as breath.

“Gifts create a sense of obligation,” she said. “Not debt, exactly, because it can’t be measured. And because it can’t be measured, it can’t be definitively repaid. If instead you’d given me the coin you spent to buy that, I’d know what I owed, and I could give it back and be done. By giving me a gift instead, you build the sense of owing without a path to repayment, and so I’m more likely, for example, to grant you a favor or make some concession that I’d never have agreed to if I’d been given an explicit price.”

Cithrin spread her hands, as if presenting something. Magistra Isadau nodded, but her smile seemed melancholy.

“Mani taught you well. I can hear him say all of that. Only … there is more than one way of doing what we do. Of being what we are.”

Cithrin shrugged, vaguely disappointed not to have been praised.

“All right,” she said. “How would you say it?”

“I wanted you to like me, and I was anxious that you might not.”

The older woman’s frank vulnerability brought a sudden tightness to Cithrin’s throat. She didn’t know if it was pity or surprise, sorrow or fear, only that she didn’t like it and didn’t know what more to say. Magistra Isadau nodded more than half to herself and stood.

“We eat our evening meals late, but the kitchens are always open to you. The whole family comes to table, and it isn’t formal. Rest if you like, or look around the grounds. If you’d like to go into the city, I have a girl who can guide you. In the morning, I’ll show you the office and where the books are kept.”

Cithrin tried to speak, coughed, and tried again.

“Thank you, Magistra.”

“You’re welcome. And truly? I am glad you’ve come.”

For a long time after Isadau had left, Cithrin sat at the desk, her gaze on the little plant as if it might be somehow dangerous.

Captain Marcus Wester

Marcus leaned against the slick, waxy bark of the tree and stared out over the valley. Their recent days in the cloud forest had kept his horizon close. Fifteen feet, twenty at most. The thick-packed trees, stubborn brush, and warm mist had tied a cloth across his eyes until he felt that each day had ended in the same stand of trees by the same brook, lulled to sleep by the same bright-colored birds. When he came to the ridge, it was like the world cracking open. Mountains as steep and sharp as black knives rose toward the white sky. Row after row, each more grey than the one before, until he could imagine them receding forever. The sun, high and to his left, was little more than a brighter stretch of haze.

The steady footfalls of his companion came up from behind him, as familiar as his own breath.

“Isn’t …” Marcus said, then coughed and tried again. “Isn’t there supposed to be a winter? I remember there being winter.”

“I think you’ll find we’re too far south,” Kitap rol Keshmet said, “and that seasons don’t behave the same way here that they did north of the Inner Sea.”

“No winter, then.”

“I’m afraid there’s only the wet season and the dry.”

“Pity we couldn’t have come in the dry season.”

“We did.”

“Ah.” Marcus pushed himself back up to standing. “I’m enjoying all this less than I’d hoped to.”

Kit’s laughter rolled.

“I’m not joking,” Marcus said.

“I know you aren’t. The village should be just ahead.”

For most of his life, Marcus had thought of Lyoneia as another kingdom, large and divided against itself, but in essence familiar. The great moat of the Inner Sea had kept the threat of war from being a greater concern than the battles and intrigues nearer at hand. There were mercenary companies that wintered in Lyoneian ports or took guard contracts when merchants went overland to the Southling cities for silver and spice. The vastness of the land and its impassibility surprised him, as well as its profound differences from the places he’d known.

The land itself fought against travel: sharp, stony peaks with bogs at their bases; thick, snake-rich forests; wetlands crossed by stone roads long since fallen to rubble. Farmable land was rare and guarded, illness was common and hard to cure, and the villages, towns, and cities distrustful of two Firstblood men traveling alone. When Kit had said that the mules would cause more delay than they were worth, Marcus had disagreed. They’d sold the last of them at a trading post five days before, and Marcus hadn’t missed them yet. Marcus found himself longing for the plains and mountains of Birancour and the Free Cities, the Pût and Elassae. Even Northcoast and Imperial Antea, for all their faults, had the dragon’s roads, jade green and more permanent than mountains. For the most part, they had set borders too, and the corruption of their politics was a familiar kind.

The Southling guards appeared among the trees. Their massive black eyes and pale skins made them seem young, but they were men full grown. Warriors with bows drawn and swords at the ready. It was easy to underestimate a Southling, but any of the thirteen races could kill. Even the Drowned. Marcus held his arms wide, hands open to show that his blade was sheathed.

“We mean no harm,” Kit said. “We are no threat to your people.”

Despite all their travels together, despite having seen the spiders that lived in Kit’s blood and testing the powers that they gave to the old actor, Marcus couldn’t hear anything different when he spoke. The warm tone of voice, the careful diction, the humor and sorrow were all just the same. Only instead of saying, I believe you will find us harmless, or I hope you will forgive our intrusion—instead of pointing all the meaning back to him and his own fallibility—he made an assertion. The corruption in his blood refused to be doubted.

The Southlings blinked. They didn’t lower their weapons, but they held them a fraction less tightly.

“You are what?” one of the bowmen demanded.

“Travelers,” Kit said. “Seekers. I am called Kitap rol Keshmet, and this is Marcus Wester. We have come from far to the north to speak with your mother, if she will allow it.”

“No blades come to the mother, no.”

“You may take our swords,” Kit said.

The Southlings turned to one another, speaking in a tongue Marcus had never heard before. His nose itched but he didn’t reach in to scratch it. He didn’t want the soldiers to think he was reaching for a weapon. Kit’s coarse hair and wiry beard framed his calm, smiling face, as if he were an uncle returned from a long journey with salt taffy in his pockets and tall tales to amuse the children.

“If we ever come to a place they can’t understand your words,” Marcus said, “what happens then?”

“I expect that will be more difficult,” Kit said.

The Southlings’ gabble reached a climax, and the bowman blinked at them.

“Throw down your blades, you,” he said. “We take you motherwards.”

Slowly, Marcus unbuckled his belt, pulled it off, and tossed sword and scabbard to the mossy ground. Kit did the same, and added the dagger from his sleeve as well. One of the younger Southlings collected them. The bowman turned and seemed to vanish into the tangle of trees. Marcus and Kit had to struggle to find him again, and then to keep up.

The trail was visible once Marcus saw the Southlings using it, but it would have been easy to overlook. The trees and brush hadn’t been hacked back, but shaped. There were no axe-cut branches or roped-back twigs to show that this was the habitation of humanity. The path was obscure. Hidden. Sometimes the way doubled back, often under high trees where archers might perch. There were no great stone walls and no place to build them, but the forest itself was a kind of fortification.

It seemed like half a day before they reached the first unmistakable signs of human habitation. A stone-paved yard with thatched huts all around it seemed to emerge from the trees like someone walking out of a fog. That the stone was only marked by a green patina where moss had been scraped away, that the fissures in the pavement hadn’t become home to saplings was evidence enough that the place was maintained. Holding the forest at bay, even for so small a space as this, would have been a lifetime’s work. And at the far side of the yard, a massive statue. Perhaps it had once been of a human—Southling or Jasuru or Firstblood. The long ages had eroded it until it was almost shapeless. At at its base, a larger hut with a plume of pale smoke rising from the hole at its top.

The bowman turned to them, lifting a hand.

“You will wait here,” he said. “I will ask our mother if she will speak to you.”

“I am very grateful,” Kit said, lowering himself to the stone.

Marcus sat too. The other warriors who had escorted them remained standing and armed, but Marcus felt no sense of threat from them. The way they held themselves was more proprietary, as if they’d brought some bizarre bird back from the hunt. Before long, people began to emerge from the shadows of the huts. Children haunted the doorways, wide eyes so large they seemed about to consume their faces. And then women and older men, yawning and fresh from sleep. Marcus had forgotten more than once that Southlings were more comfortable in the night. The dragons had made them that way. They came out slowly, one at at time, and then in groups, until something between thirty and forty men, women, and children talked and laughed and pointed from the edge of the yard. There were more than could have fit into the little huts, so Marcus assumed that there were structures under the ground—tunnels or old ruins or some such—where the villagers spent their sleeping days.

He wouldn’t have been surprised to sit on the smooth stones, legs crossed and aching and the insects making a feast of him, until the middle of the night. Instead, the village mother took pity on them. The sun had sunk behind the forest canopy, the sky turned to rose and gold with only the first hints of twilight’s ash, when the bowman returned with an old man who wore a chain of gold around his neck and brightly dyed cloth around his elbows and knees. The cunning man, or anyway a Southling village’s version of one. The cunning man walked a slow circle around them, his breath thick and heavy. Marcus felt the air on the back of his neck stirring. Kit watched solemnly as the cunning man finished his course, clapped his hands together, and shouted. A burst of light and sudden, vicious cold, and then the cunning man was walking up to them, grinning. His hand touched Marcus’s shoulder, and the two men nodded to one another, smiling. A little show of magic and force to keep them in line, then, followed by welcome. Kit’s grin was warm, open, friendly. The wall of guards dissolved, and the villagers came closer, as pleased and curious as if Marcus had been a two-headed puppy. A girl of perhaps six years came up to Marcus, holding out a broad green leaf as a present. When he took it, she giggled and fled.

“The mother rests now, but she will speak to you soon,” the cunning man said. “Very soon.”

“Give her our thanks,” Marcus said.

The haze went grey and then black. No starlight could fight its way through the thick air, and the moon was only a lighter quarter of the sky. Around them, the life of the village bustled. Children carried great buckets of water slung on sticks. A group of old men sat by one of the huts smoking something sweeter than tobacco and weaving long, thin strips of bark into rope. Another group of armed men arrived carrying a dead animal that looked like a longskulled boar, and for a moment the two strange travelers became only the second most interesting event of the night. Men and women watched as the animal was skinned and butchered. The carcass was being rubbed with a brown savory-smelling paste and prepared for the cookfire when the cunning man appeared again at Marcus’s elbow.

“Now,” he said. “Come both with me.”

The village mother’s hut was thick-walled and smaller inside than Marcus had expected. What room there was had been devoted to a single greeting chamber as ornate and impressive in its way as the greatest throne rooms of Northcoast. A dozen silent men knelt against the walls, swords and daggers in their hands. The dim orange light came from a single brazier, and by it the woman in the wooden chair seemed to float in a velvet blackness. Her pale skin caught the light, glowed with it. Her gown was simply cut, but glittering with soft metal thread and gemstones. She could have been a child or a woman Marcus’s age. Either way, she was beautiful.

Kit sank to his knees, and Marcus followed his example.

“Most gracious lady,” Kit said. “We thank you for speaking with us. We have come very far, and we are in need of your aid.”

The village mother smiled. Younger, Marcus thought. She had to be younger than he was.

“It is rare that travelers come so far to ask favors of me. More often, those who ask for my help find themselves where they had not meant to be.”

Kit fumbled for a moment in the darkness, then drew a folded parchment from his belt and unfolded it. Marcus couldn’t see it, but he didn’t need to. He’d studied the curves and angles of that map a thousand times, and in better light. If the village mother kept it or destroyed it, Marcus could draw it again from memory.

“A great evil has woken in the north,” Kit said. “A corruption from before the fall of the dragons. Already its chaos is spreading. With time, it will even reach here.”

The village mother nodded to the cunning man. He took the parchment from Kit’s hand and walked the few steps to her. Her gaze flickered across it, and the faintest scowl touched the corners of her mouth.

“And this?” she asked.

“There are tales of an ancient reliquary. Items of power gathered together by Assian Bey in the days after the fall of the Dragon Empire. Among these, there is said to be a blade envenomed by the art of the greatest of dragons. We have the task of finding this sword, carrying it back to the north, and with it, ending the corruption that threatens us all.”

Three of the men against the wall shifted their weight. With the poor light, it was hard to say, but Marcus had the impression that they were less preparing for an attack than seeing how he and Kit would react if they feared one. With as many as there were, he and Kit would be cut down in a breath. He might be able to kill or hurt one of the others. Two if he were lucky. Since there was no way to answer the threat, he ignored it.

“Three generations ago,” Kit continued, “a scholar and adventurer led an expedition from Herez. He was a Dartinae who went by the name of Akad Silas. He wrote back to his wife from the field. That which you are holding is said to come from the last reports that came from him. It suggests that he and his men were very near here, and that he believed they had found signs of the reliquary’s existence. I have come here to beg of you, gracious lady. If you know anything of this treasure or of the Silas expedition, please tell me. The fate of the world rests upon it.”

“And you?” the village mother said. It took a moment before Marcus realized she was speaking to him.

“Following Kit,” Marcus said. “Keeping him out of trouble.”

Her sniff carried a cartload of contempt. She handed the parchment back to the cunning man, who bowed until his forehead was even with his knees before he turned and put it in Kit’s outstretched hand.

“I am sorry, noble wanderer. You have wasted your time,” she said. “I know nothing of this adventurer, and I have never heard of any such reliquary.”

The soft exhalation, almost a grunt, that came from Kit might have been the blow of bitter disappointment. But Marcus was fairly sure it wasn’t.

“The map shows a place not far from here where Silas believed he would gain entrance. There is nothing there?”

“There is not. Nor is there any such place within the range of my people. You have been misled.”

Kit ran his hand over his beard to cover a smile.

“I am bitterly sorry to hear this,” he said. “But I thank you for your kindness and your hospitality.”

“You and your servant are welcome to remain and take your rest.” Her voice was gentler now. Marcus imagined that she would be glad to be so easily believed. With a man other than Kit, she might have been.

“You are kind,” Kit said. “Please, let me give you this map as a gift. It is a lie set in ink, but it has its beauty. It is of little use to me now, but it does show something of the lands which belong to you and your people.”

“I accept your gift. I did not expect northerners to be so thoughtful.”

“Northerners are as stones in soft earth,” Kit said. “We’re all different kinds. And some, perhaps, worth more than others.”

The fruit and meat that waited for them when they emerged from the hut would have been the midday meal for any of the other races of humanity. They ate in darkness apart from a small lamp placed near them as a courtesy. Around them, the bustle of village life went on by thin moonlight. The meat from the long-faced boar was sweet and a little gamey, but it was fresh and cooked with onions. A woman brought clay bowls of fresh, cold water to them. Marcus wouldn’t have been more pleased by the finest wine.

On the farther side of the yard, a circle of children sat, whispering into one another’s ears and occasionally breaking out in roars of laughter. Kit watched them with a sour expression.

“Problem?” Marcus asked.

Kit nodded toward the children at their game.

“You’ve played that?” he asked.

“Everyone’s played that. Whisper in one ear, then repeat it until something absurd comes out the far end. Harmless enough.”

“I dislike it,” Kit said. “I’m afraid that all the world’s like that. A long chain of men and women speaking what they believe as clearly as they can, and the truth leaking out like they were trying to hold water in their fists. Even without lies, without deceit, that over there is the best we can manage. A crust of misunderstandings. And all of history is made that way.”

Marcus nodded. The tone Kit spoke in said more than the actual words. “She was lying, then?”

“She was. Not all of it. When she said the Silas map didn’t show where the reliquary was, that was truth. When she said it wasn’t in the range of her people … that was less than true.”

“So it’s close, then.”

Kit took an onion and bit into it, shrugging.

“Probably. Certainly she believes it is.”

“That’s good.”

“On the other hand, it seems to me she’s protective of it. If we press on, the locals may be less friendly than they’ve been.”

The children reached the end of their round, and a great roar of laughter rose up in the darkness. The sounds of daytime laid over the shoulders of night left Marcus uneasy. Now, as guests, it was only a peculiarity of Southling hospitality; the working of a mostly unseen village. When they pressed on unwelcome, there could be other sounds with fewer children and less laughter. He remembered someone telling him that fighting a Southling at night was like fighting with a blindfold. From behind them, a man’s voice called out in the darkness. To their left, another voice answered. The haze thinned enough that the moon showed through in a halo of its own light, too dim to cast a shadow. An insect landed on Marcus’s hand and he shooed it away.

“How much do we know about what happened to the Silas expedition?” Marcus asked.

“Well,” Kit said, his voice reflective and philosophical, “we’re fairly certain they didn’t come back.”

Clara

Once she knew to look, the evidence was everywhere. The snow-paved streets of Camnipol had hardly recovered from the violence of the summer, but the preparations had begun anew. Imri, once the cook’s assistant in Clara’s kitchens, was seeing a carter’s boy who’d been hauling pig iron to the forges since before midwinter. When Clara stopped by the forges on a pretext, all she saw were the long, easily bent spear points Dawson used to deride. They were meant to lodge in a shield and then hang from it, weighting a soldier’s arm, slowing him and breaking his formation. She could hear her husband’s snort of contempt, could see the dismissive scowl. A weapon for house painters, he’d have called it, and nothing that a nobleman would employ. The men who ran the city granaries smoked in the alley and shook their heads. The orders had come that they should not expect the spring wheat crop to refill the stores. It didn’t take Clara a great leap to guess where that food might go. In the temples, the priests intoned psalms about loyalty and the bearing of burdens now for greater glory later, and not of justice or the love of peace. And even in the traditionalist temples, the brown-robes of Geder Palliako’s spider goddess sometimes took the pulpit, declaiming in the accents of the Keshet and making cutting remarks about insects and cockroaches that seemed to implicate the Timzinae without ever quite putting a name to them. The magistrates had begun to sentence fewer young men to the cages and more to martial service. The prisons rose brick by pale brick, as much threat as architecture.

The true conversations of power, she no longer had the means to reach. Even those among the noble classes who still took her company were at their holdings or with the hunt. When the first thaw came, it would certainly be different. She would surely be able to discover which direction Palliako meant to send his blades. And also by then, it would all be too far gone to prevent. Walking across the bridges and through the narrow streets, she felt as if she were balancing on a landslide. It was all so much larger than she was that it might as well have been the weather. She had as much ability to stop this as to turn aside a storm.

But Jorey would come back, and Vicarian. Perhaps, one day, Barriath would return from his exile or at least write from it. Her boys. Help from Elisia seemed unlikely, but Clara would send letters to her all the same. The worst her daughter could do was burn them unread. In the meantime, she walked through the city, Vincen Coe at her side, seeking what information she could and putting it together as best she might.

Even when it took her to places that she would have been wiser to avoid.

Stay behind me, my lady,” Vincen said.

“M’lady, is it?” the smallest of the three men said, his grin gap-toothed and unpleasant. “’Strue, then is it? That’s Treacher Kalliam’s widow.”

“What was it like, sleeping with a traitor?” the largest of them asked.

Clara held her chin up. Rage and humiliation fought against copper-tasting fear, but she didn’t let it show. The street was narrow enough that passing him would be difficult without risking the huntsman’s blade. She didn’t know what would happen if they tried to walk past without showing more steel or making their threats explicit.

“You have no business with us,” she said. “Let us pass.”

The smallest one drew a battered knife and began to clean his thumbnail with it, ignoring her words. “Long way you’ve come from there to here.”

Vincen kept himself between her and the three men. She couldn’t imagine Vincen would allow himself to be surrounded, but neither would he wish to make the first blow. It would be a choice of tragedies. Like so many things.

“We don’t want trouble,” Vincen said.

“Who does?” the largest man said, mock-philosophically, and he strode forward.

Vincen’s blade flicked out, cutting the air. The larger man growled and drew a short, curved blade. Its edge shone in the dim light. It was hardly longer than a child’s forearm, and well suited for violence in the confines of the narrow way. Vincen stepped back, using the reach of his own blade to keep the man at distance and set himself for the coming blow.

“We’ve come to see Ammit No-Thumb,” Clara said. “Perhaps you gentlemen could point the way.”

The middle one, silent until now, spoke. His voice was slow, but with a depth of intelligence that gave Clara something like hope.

“What business would you have with our Ammit?”

“I met his daughter on the Prisoner’s Span last week, and she mentioned that she had had some distress. I have a tea that might be of some use to her, and so I’ve brought it. Or will, if you’ll let us past.”

“Ammit’s no friend of mine,” the smallest said. He had taken a firmer grip on his blade. The largest took a step forward, and Vincen slid to block his progress.

“What sort of distress?” the middle one asked.

Clara hoisted her eyebrow and didn’t speak. In truth, she had nothing more than a few pinches of tobacco and a pocketful of dried apples, but she’d spoken to the girl long enough to know Ammit was a kind soul and that she lived nearby. That she would be known and thought of kindly was a gamble. The silence stretched. The smallest man glanced over his shoulder, then back.

“You’re in the wrong street,” the middle one said. “Go back to the turning and go three more toward the wall. There’s a red house with a half dozen barrels along the side. Turn there.”

“My thanks,” Clara said with a nod, then turned and walked briskly back along the narrow street. Her throat felt thin as a straw and her heart beat like a sparrow. A moment later, Vincen was behind her.

“Not so quickly,” he murmured. “Nothing like running to call the chase.”

Clara forced herself to walk more slowly, as if she belonged there. As if she were safe.

“Has it always been like this?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“Ma’am?”

“The knives and the violence. The inability to walk through the city without fear of being bled. Has Camnipol always been like this, and I didn’t know it, or is this a change?”

“Change,” Vincen said without even a pause for thought. “There’s always rough places. A taproom with a bad reputation. A street where men gather when they’re unwelcome anyplace else. But since the summer … no, it’s worse.”

“Well. At least it isn’t only that I was too blind to see it.”

The pale sky held the red and gold of sunset to the west and the deepening indigo to the east. With every day that passed, the light grew a little longer, the morning a little brighter. First thaw would, she guessed, come early this year. She hoped it was an omen of a gentler year, but she couldn’t bring herself as far as belief. She walked north, Vincen at her side. He didn’t take her arm, but stood near enough to her that she could take his if she chose. It seemed the whole of their relationship, writ small. When she passed the turning that would have taken them to the boarding house, he didn’t so much as break stride.

Dawson Kalliam, once Baron of Osterling Fells and her husband of decades, had no grave. After his execution, the body had been taken to the Silver Bridge and cast into the Division like common trash. Somewhere, far below, his bones lay amid the water and chaos. Tradition set the penalty for retrieving him for a gentler burial to be death, and Clara felt sure it would be upheld. And so every few days she found herself walking out to the middle of the span to spend a moment with the high and open air that had swallowed the last of her husband.

Below her, the pigeons turned in their flock, gliding on the drafts and perching on the Division’s deep sides or the lower, lesser bridges that spanned the gap farther down. She closed her eyes and bowed her head as she’d seen her mother do before her own father’s ashes. It was what a woman did when she was remembering a man who had been her heart and was gone. It wasn’t the first death she’d mourned. She’d lost her own father, her own mother. A brother taken by fever when she’d been hardly more than a girl. She knew what to expect, and how terrible it would be. How terrible it always was. The knowledge took nothing from the pain, or if not nothing, surely not enough.

After a time, she took a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbed away the tears, and walked back to the edge of the span where Vincen was waiting. He knew why she came, and he would not cross with her. Most times, she let the small courtesy pass uncommented. Perhaps it was her growing despair or the aftermath of fear, but today she paused before him, tilted her head, and considered him.

Vincen Coe stood only just taller than she did, his darker eyes cast down only a degree to meet hers. His hair was the light brown of oak leaves in autumn. His jaw was perhaps a little too broad, his nose bent slightly from some long-healed break. This was her self-appointed protector, this huntsman trapped in the treeless paths of the city. He had stolen a kiss from her once, and it had tasted of blood. He’d sworn a kind of love for her, and she had dismissed it because it was ridiculous. And then she had sent him away, because perhaps it was growing less ridiculous.

And that odd, half-acknowledged attachment had saved her life again today.

“Why are you here?” she asked. The question had become something of a ritual between them, and his smile meant that he’d understood her. Why are you not off chasing some girl your own age? Why do you persist in wasting your own life in service to mine? How can I put so much trust in anything so clearly absurd?

“My lady,” he said, as he often did, “you saved me when I was lost, and I will follow you forever, if you let me.”

Clara shook her head impatiently, and Vincen smiled. A dark cart drawn by a black horse clattered by. A crow called out and another answered back, or else its echo. She took his arm, folding her own around it as an aunt might a favorite nephew.

“You are a child.”

“I’m older than Jorey.”

“Jorey is my son.”

“And wed.”

“So it’s not that you’re young, it’s that I’m old,” Clara said, laughing. “Lovely.”

“You’re more beautiful than most women half your age.”

After her mourning on the bridge, the flirtation was like a drink of sharp wine, cleansing and astringent with a thick aftertaste of guilt. Her husband wasn’t a full season dead. Her children were scattered to the winds, and her house was disgraced. Trading honeyed barbs with an infatuated young man, walking with her arm in his, was scandalous, low behavior, and a part of her soul cringed even as she did it. But another part swelled and stretched and unfurled.

Sometimes she felt she was two women at once. The grief-crippled widow who wept every night and forced a smile every morning was one, and she was undeniable in her sorrow. But in the heart of her disgrace and loss, there was another woman. Not a younger one, but one who had caught the scent of a freedom unlike any she’d ever known, and who was dreadfully hungry for it.

From the time she’d been old enough to put on a dress, she had been a woman of the noble class. Her path had been trod by generations, and led more or less to the same grave that held their dry bones. The world was disrupted now, broken, and she was no one. What scandal could touch her that would compare with what she already carried? Even if the highest names in the court saw her now, they would turn away and pretend they hadn’t. She had ceased to matter. Her actions and opinions were impotent, and so they could be anything. She was already fallen, and so she’d been freed.

It was an illusion, she knew. All actions carried consequences, even among the disgraced. But it was a convincing illusion, and it gave her hope that the world she had lost was not the only world there was.

“Can I …” Vincen said, his voice breaking into her reverie. She was surprised to see how far they had walked in silence and how close she had been holding his arm. “I’m sorry, m’lady, but can I ask?”

“I reserve the right to lie,” she said cheerfully, but the moment of light repartee was gone, and the words sounded hollow.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “What is it we’re doing?”

“Walking home before sunset for another bowl of your cousin’s somewhat purgatorial stew, I believe,” Clara said.

“Not that, ma’am. I mean that every day, we speak to people and find out what we can. Put together what’s happening in the city and in the empire like we’re tracking broken twigs and scat. But … well, but what is it you hope to do after?”

It was a powerful question, and one that Clara knew she’d avoided asking herself. Thus far, truly, she’d done nothing. To wander the city and make what connections she could was a benign occupation for a widow living on her son’s limited charity. To conspire against the throne … well, it had an air of danger and romance about it, but what precisely it meant was an open question.

In truth, she didn’t hate Geder Palliako. She had heard from her son Jorey of the burning of Vanai. She knew of Palliako’s thwarted impulse to kill the entire noble class of Asterilhold. She had listened to him slaughter her husband as a traitor, though she hadn’t had the strength to watch. If she had swallowed darkness and sworn revenge, no one could have argued that it hadn’t been earned. But she had also seen Palliako frightened and at sea among the young women at her son’s wedding. He had been at her side when the treachery of Feldin Maas had been exposed. She felt about him the way she did about fire or flood or a blight that took a season’s crop. He was merely a catastrophe. One might fear the flames even as one stood against them, but to hate them was absurd.

But what, then, was to be done?

“Tell someone, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. “Preferably someone in a position to do something about it. Surely there will be a dissenting group within the court that would—”

“Know and recognize you? Palliako’s sent his private guard for you once already.”

“He didn’t keep me,” Clara said, but the point was not lost on her. There had been others to go before Geder’s odd religious tribunal who had not been so fortunate. And the next time she might not be either. The winter sun slipped down behind the roofs and walls of Camnipol, the sky fading to a soft grey. The taprooms and coffee houses lit their lanterns, the sounds of music and song curling out to the streets, but even that seemed strained and martial. It would have been pretty to believe that the poison in the blood of Antea was only Geder Palliako, but if she were to be honest, she knew it had already spread. Her kingdom had caught a fever, and it would be years before it was well.

If she hoped to avoid that, she would need to be discreet. Happily, she’d been raised as a woman in the royal court where discretion, subtlety, and the tacit control of information were already something of a blood sport. Clara had never indulged in the destruction of another woman’s reputation herself, but she’d seen it done often enough. She had sometimes stepped in to mitigate campaigns waged against her or her friends and allies. This wasn’t so different.

When the intention was to undermine without being thought to do so, it was often wise to begin outside one’s normal circle and let the gossip travel in, though what that would mean in this case wasn’t perfectly clear. And anyone she did turn to would themselves need to be discreet, which was always a problem as so many people who came in possession of a secret seemed incapable of restraining the urge to brag about it …

The sound that came from her throat was low and brief, something between a laugh and cough, and it spoke of profound satisfaction.

“My lady?” Vincen Coe said.

“I’ll have an errand for you tomorrow. Find a courier headed for Northcoast who can accept an extra letter.”

“We have allies in Northcoast?”

She smiled and patted Vincen’s arm, but she didn’t answer, because there was no advantage in his knowing her intention. Discretion began at home.

Back at the boarding house, she spent a coin for three sheets of rag paper and thimble of ink. Paying for a courier would tax her allowance badly. She would be living on yesterday’s bread until the next handful of coin came from Jorey, but it couldn’t be avoided. She sat alone by the light of a candle, composing the letter in her mind for fear of wasting the paper.

Sir,

We have met, but I cannot think you would remember me. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer not to identify myself to you at this time. You have been represented to me as a man of both tact and influence, and for this reason, I wish to share with you some observations I have made concerning affairs in the city of Camnipol and also my concerns for what these observations portend.

To begin, the Lord Regent has, under the pretext of raising barracks for the guard, begun the construction of prisons within the city walls. I have reached that conclusion for the following reasons …

Even with her script tight, small, and as legible as she could achieve, she ran short of paper before things she wished to say. One fact flowed gracefully into another, each observation building on the ones before. She kept the tone calm and conversational, giving room for the reader to draw his own conclusions rather than impressing her own upon him in any but the most unobtrusive way. When she was finished, she sewed the edges herself, fixing the threads in a simple knot. She addressed the outermost face in a single line.

Paerin Clark, Medean Bank, Carse.

Geder

That they remain unprepared,” Lord Ternigan said. “That is our best advantage.”

The map of Sarakal lay unfolded on the table, the four men looking down at it as if to divine some secret teaching from the shape of its borders. Geder had chosen Ternigan to be Lord Marshal for the invasion. Lord Skestinin, as always, commanded the navy that was even now leaving the far northern seas for the warmer southern waters. And Lord Daskellin, ambassador to Northcoast, whose duty was to see that the northern border of the empire was protected by a wall of friendship and promises while the blades and bows traveled south. They were the war council. They and, of course, Basraship.

The hunt had come here last, to the holdings at Watermarch, winter almost at its end. The holdfast was perched on a high granite cliff that looked over the wide sea to the east. The trees in the garden outside the wide window were only sticks, but their brown had the first blush of green. The thaw was coming, and in days. Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch, had set aside a full wing of his home for this meeting, even the most trusted of servants sent away. It was the inner council. The last secret meeting.

“Food’s an issue,” Daskellin said. He stood between Geder and the wide windows, the light behind him and the darkness of his skin conspiring to make him seem more silhouette than man. “After the struggles in Asterilhold and then the unrest all through the summer, we were looking at a thin spring to begin with. Things are uncertain and unsettled, and people want to feel that the storm’s passed.”

“There won’t be any fighting there,” Geder said. “There won’t be any fighting anywhere in Antea.”

“It’s not only this crop I’m thinking of,” Daskellin said. “Fielding the army takes food, but it also takes farmers.”

“That’s what those roaches in Nus are counting on,” Ternigan said. “We’ll be fine. Once we take their granaries, we’ll hardly need support from the Kingspire at all.”

“Those granaries are set to feed their cities, not our army,” Skestinin said, scratching his beard.

“Being conquered is sometimes uncomfortable,” Ternigan said, and the issue was dismissed.

Sarakal was a thin nation, dominated by the port city of Nus in the north and the river city of Inentai in the south. Between them were the flint hills and farmsteads, villages and minor holdings of the traditional families, linked by the pale green thread of the dragon’s road like beads on a string. Antea was the center of Firstblood power in the world, and Sarakal was the center of nothing. Its traditional families were mostly Timzinae, though there were some Jasuru and Firstblood, and the cities ruled by a high council drawn by lot every seven years. The influence of Borja and the Keshet showed in its casual attitude toward the nobility of blood and its heaping on of invented titles. A wealthy man of a traditional family might have himself declared prince or regos or exalt without any duties or holdings to come with the name. The council might strip a landholder of his rank without affecting his property or taxes.

But because of the mixture of races, the traditional families had links of kinship to Elassae and Borja, and even to the minor houses of Antea. If Sarakal had as little as half a season to prepare, the Lord Marshal and the armies of the empire might be facing pikemen from Elassae and Borjan cavalry along with the native defenses. Food and soldiers could sail from Hallskar into Nus or ride carts from Elassae or the Keshet into Inentai. To be done right—to be done well—the assault had to go as quickly and as unequivocally here as it had in Asterilhold.

In Asterilhold, where the armies had been led by Dawson Kalliam, Lord Marshal, first hero and then traitor. Even now, months after the fact, Geder saw the old man’s face twisted in rage, Basrahip’s blood on his blade. It seemed unjust that even after Dawson Kalliam’s coup had been defeated and his life ended, Geder still felt haunted by him and his inexplicable betrayal.

“Lord Regent?” Ternigan said. “Do you have an opinion?”

Geder looked at the men around the table, painfully aware of having lost the thread of the conversation. There had been a question, and now he was going to look like a fool for not knowing what it was. He cleared his throat and the beginning of a blush rose in his throat.

“Well, yes. Let me see,” he said. “Minister Basrahip? Would you care to offer an opinion?”

At his place beside the window, the priest lifted his head and smiled beatifically.

“There shall be no uprising to distract you,” he said, his voice rough and melodious. “Prince Geder has lifted up temples to the goddess, and those who hear her voice will remain true.”

“All respect, Minister,” Canl Daskellin said, “there was a temple in Camnipol last summer, and things didn’t go so well there.”

“They will now,” Basrahip said. Daskellin shuddered and looked away.

“Still,” Ternigan said, “I think we won’t have the men to control the full nation. Not this season. Nus, without question. We’ll have it by autumn, let whoever’s escaped to the south sue for peace. Gives us a good thick buffer between Antean land and any of these bastards who think they’d care to make trouble for us again.”

“You will have it all,” Basrahip said. There was no defiance in his tone. At most, a sense of gentle correction as one might hear a tutor take with a pupil. “As the goddess delivered Asterilhold to you, so she will reclaim the lands stolen by the Timzinae. The false race will be cast out and have no home.”

“That’s lovely, Minister,” Ternigan said. “But these actions carry their own constraints. I have only so many knights. Only so many bows. Only so many blades. Overreaching is worse than failure. A collapse when we’ve outstripped our own support could push us back past our own borders.”

“It will not happen so,” Basrahip said.

Ternigan frowned, turning back to the map. His frown wasn’t that of an insulted man, though there was perhaps a bit of that, so much as someone reexamining a puzzle, apprehensive that some criticial clue had been missed.

“Regardless,” Geder said, “the first part of the campaign is in place, yes?”

“The blockade will be there,” Lord Skestinin said. “No ships in or out of the port of Nus without our men searching them, and no landings in the coves east or west of the city.”

“Good,” Geder said. “And the foot troops?”

“Ten thousand sword-and-bows are camped at Flor, waiting for me,” Ternigan said. “I have sworn statements from half a dozen barons and counts that they’ll raise their levies and ride in after once I give the word. I haven’t done it yet for fear of raising an alarm, but they should arrive just about when the first force needs relief. We’ll be the hammer that breaks the anvil this time, just you watch.”

“I’ll repair to the west,” Daskellin said. “I’ll reassure Northcoast and Birancour that we’re only looking to secure our borders, and that Asterilhold’s done that in the west. They aren’t likely to care what we’re doing in the east so long as it doesn’t affect their taxes and trades.”

“And the priests?” Geder asked.

“They will travel with your army,” Basrahip said. “Where they go, you shall find always victory.”

“Well, that’ll be damned pleasant,” Ternigan said. “Nothing goes quite as well as constant, unending victory, ah?”

“I’ll want reports to me in Camnipol,” Geder said. “Daily, if you can.”

“We’ll wear the courier’s hoofs to the quick, Lord Regent,” Ternigan said. “You have my word on it.”

Geder nodded.

“Well, then. Let’s make it official, shall we?”

Without servants to wait on them, Daskellin was the one to clear the table, bring the parchments and the ink. Basrahip shook his head in mock despair and amusement. Making a thing more real by writing it down made as much sense to the priest as cooling something with fire, but Geder shrugged and Basrahip waved him on, as if indulging him.

The pages were short, the wording simple and classic. Geder signed at the end, and then the others each took the pen in turn and stood witness. It took less time from the start to the end than it would to eat a bowl of soup, and after so many weeks of preparation, it felt both exciting and oddly a bit melancholy, as if the pleasant part of the work were over and the tedious stretch about to begin.

“Well, then. That’s it,” Geder said as Daskellin poured the blotting sand over the ink. “War.”

Word spread through the holdfast of Watermarch like it was carried by the wind. The King’s Hunt was ending for the year, and those high nobles who had expected to retire to their holdings for the few weeks before the opening of the court season in Camnipol had news to carry back home with them, and tasks that perhaps they hadn’t expected. Geder heard the excitement in their voices, even when they spoke of other things—the cut of dresses and cloaks, the marriages and liaisons of the court, the scandalous poets and thinly veiled plays—everything was suddenly really about the war. There was almost a sense of relief that came with it. The victory over Asterilhold should have been a time of celebration, and instead it had become a nightmare. Even when the conspirators had been killed, their lands retaken by the Severed Throne, it had left a sour taste in the mouths of the victors.

And in truth, even the battle with Asterilhold had carried a sense of infighting. The bloodlines of Antea and Asterilhold had crossed and mixed for centuries. The noble banners that faced each other in the fields outside Kaltfel had belonged to cousins, even if often at several removes. While there were some Firstblood relations in the traditional families of Sarakal, they were few, and when the nation’s name arose, the image it carried was of a Timzinae or Jasuru, of a chaotic government hardly better than a nomadic tribe with its shoes nailed in one place to keep it from straying. It made the coming slaughter feel cleaner. To see that the enemy came from outside and that they would be brought to their knees by Antean strength was a return to the way things were supposed to be. Even Geder found it relieving.

On those years when the first thaw came after the end of the hunt, tradition called for a final occasion. A ball, a feast, the comparing of honors. Canl Daskellin held the feast in a massive glassed ballroom, braziers burning at the ends of every table keeping the air thick and warm. Outside the massive network of glass, the sea was the color of slate flecked with white, the setting sun a glory of orange and gold. Geder sat at the high table, Prince Aster at one side, Basrahip at the other. It was like something from an old poem, and these men toasting each other and trading barbed rhymes, competing with extemporaneous speeches on patriotism and piety and bragging about how many women they’d bedded in their youth were the dragons of old reborn in human form. It made him wish that his own father attended the hunt, just so that he could be sitting at Geder’s side and watching it all.

And yet he was not wholly at peace.

The seating was, as always, arranged by the status within the court. The nearer to the high table, Geder, and Prince Aster, the more honored. Canl Daskellin, as host, shared the high table, as did his wife and his daughter, Sanna. Sanna wore a gown that left Geder feeling something between embarrassed and excited, and kept smiling at him. Then, one table farther, Ternigan and his family along with Lord Skestinin and his son, Bynal. But not his daughter. Geder tried to ignore the absence, but it gnawed at him from the first soup through the pheasant. When the venison came, he excused himself.

The apartments were in the north wing of the holding, positioned well enough for an honored merchant or the lowest of the noble. When Geder’s personal guard announced him, no servant came to see him in. Sabiha’s hair was the color of wheat, and her cheeks were round and touched with a permanent rose that made her seem younger than she was. The politeness of her expression didn’t match the coolness of her eyes. Now that he’d spent some time with Lord Skestinin, he could see something of him in her, but for the most part she only seemed herself.

The sitting room was cooler than the ballroom, though it had no windows. The lamp that burned on the mantel put out a dull, buttery light that almost forgave the worn upholstery of the divan. Geder understood. Like everything in court, the amenities of the hunt meant something. Not so many years ago, he would have been given a room much like this, if he’d bothered coming to the hunt at all. Still, its shabbiness disturbed him.

“Lord Regent,” she said with the curtsey that etiquette required of her.

“Sabiha,” Geder said. “I was looking for you at the feast. And Jorey. I was looking for both of you.”

“My father thought that, given the situation, it would be better that we not appear.”

“Yes,” Geder said. “Well. I was wondering if I might speak with Jorey for a moment. And … and can I have food sent to you? There’s a whole feast, and some of it’s very good, and just because the politics of the things are what they are, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat.”

He was babbling. He knew it, and he could no more stop it than hold back the springtime. Sabiha’s smile was crooked, and he didn’t know whether she was amused or annoyed. Not that it mattered. He was Lord Regent of Antea. She would accede to his suggestions, whatever they were. If he’d asked her to throw off her gown and dance naked for him, she would have had to or risk the displeasure of the crown. It was odd how having power over people meant not knowing their true minds. Not without Basrahip there to tell him, anyway.

“It would be kind of you, my lord,” Sabiha said.

“Geder. Really, in private, call me Geder.”

“It would be kind of you, Geder,” she said. “Wait here if you’d like. I’ll get Jorey.”

“Thank you,” Geder said. Sabiha walked into the gloom of the corridor. Geder heard her voice, and then Jorey’s, and then hers again. He thought there was a warmth in them, the sound of husband and wife. His own mother had died when he was a child, so he only had the servants and slaves to judge from, but he thought he’d heard the intimate kindness in the servants’ quarters in unguarded moments. That, and books he’d read that spoke of the role of men and of women, and the connection between them. His direct experience was somewhat limited.

Jorey emerged into the light. He still wore his hunting leathers and a grey wool cloak. His hair was unruly and his eyes had a darkness under them. Geder popped up to his feet and wiped his hands on his thighs.

“Jorey,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wanted to find you and say it. Between us.”

Jorey’s smile was thin.

“It wasn’t your doing, my lord,” Jorey said, as if the words pained him. “My father’s actions were unconscionable. The death … the death you gave him—”

“Oh, not that,” Geder said quickly. He didn’t want Jorey to still feel embarrassed about what Dawson had done. “That’s in the past. Over with. I meant the war. You did hear, didn’t you?”

Jorey sat on the divan, looking up at Geder. It was an utter breach of etiquette, but Jorey didn’t seem to notice, and Geder was oddly glad that he hadn’t. Geder had Aster and Basrahip, who knew him for who he was instead of the title he answered to. And the part-Cinnae banker, Cithrin, who’d hidden with him during the worst of the troubles. Even with Jorey Kalliam, Geder could still count his friends on one hand and not use his thumb.

“You’ve decided to invade Sarakal,” Jorey said.

“Yes, that,” Geder said. “Only I named … I named Ternigan as Lord Marshal, and he picked the men he wanted on campaign with him. And after what happened with your father, and Barriath …”

In truth, Barriath Kalliam had chosen exile rather than give his loyalty to Geder. Nor had he been the only one to do so. Others had tried to lie, to swear that they would never betray Geder as others had, but Basrahip had been there to warn of their duplicity. Those died.

“Don’t apologize to me for that,” Jorey said. His gaze had wandered to the shadowed corridor. “I’ve had enough of killing to last a lifetime. I only want to go back to Lord Skestinin’s estate and look after my family.”

Geder nodded, more to himself than to Jorey. He had never taken the youngest of the Kalliams before his private tribunal, never subjected him to the unyielding certainty of Basrahip and the spider goddess. It would have seemed cruel, and after all, Jorey had renounced his father before the full court. To question his honesty or loyalty after that was like questioning whether the sea tasted of salt.

And there was also some other, deep, wordless reluctance. Geder didn’t want him in there, and he didn’t want to think too closely about why, except that it wasn’t a place for his friends. He sat at Jorey’s side, not touching, but close. Like two men on campaign sitting on the same log before a cookfire.

“I know how hard this has all been,” Geder said. “You don’t have to worry, though. I’ll be on the throne until Aster’s of age, and I’ll find a way to bring you back into the good graces of the court. You and Sabiha both.”

Jorey laughed bitterly, but didn’t speak. Geder felt a twist of anxiety in his belly and plucked at the cloth of his sleeve.

“What … what are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking about what makes a man good. Or evil. I’m wondering if I’m a good man or an evil one.”

“You aren’t evil. An evil person does bad things,” Geder said. “Even your father wasn’t evil. He was … misguided. The Timzinae who poisoned his mind against the throne? They were evil. But he was a brave man, doing what he thought was right, however wrong he was about it. I never thought he was evil.”

“Never?”

“Well,” Geder said, almost shyly, “almost never. I did lose my temper with him. There at the end. I mean, he did try to kill me.”

Jorey’s expression was unreadable—amusement, disgust, despair. He could have meant anything.

“I know that you count me as your friend, Geder,” he said at last.

The smile began in Geder’s chest as a warmth, and it spread out through his body.

“That’s all I wanted, Jorey. I just wanted you to remember that no matter what’s happened, I am your friend.”

Marcus

Good kitty,” Marcus said, his sword at the ready, “or … whatever the hell you are.”

The beast shifted its head, following the shine of steel with distrust. It stood little higher than Marcus’s waist, but nose to tail would easily measure fifteen feet. Its fur was black and mottled as if designed to disappear into the sun-dappled darkness under the jungle canopy. Dagger-long claws cut into the ground as it stepped toward him, and its jaw opened half a handspan as if it were tasting the air.

“I think it’s trying to get between us,” Kit said.

“Then stay close to me,” Marcus replied. “I don’t think it has our best interests at heart. Good kitty. Stay back.”

The beast opened its mouth with a shriek equal parts windstorm and ripping flesh. Its teeth were broad, low, and hooked. The struggle of prey caught in that jaw would only drive the bite deeper. It took another step closer and lowered its body to the ground, bunching up as if to leap.

They were in what Marcus had come to think of as a clearing. The trees were thinner here, and bits of blue sky showed between the arm-broad fronds twenty feet above him. There was room to move without being caught against tree trunks or thick, leathery scrub. That was likely why the beast had chosen this space to make its advance.

The constant noise of the wilderness—the drip of water from the trees, the high chirping call of the bright yellow frogs that swarmed over the ground at dawn and dusk, the distant scream of monkeys, the clicking of billions of unseen insects from within the rotting carpet of leaf and mold they walked on—was like an auditory fog, obscuring any sound within it. Sweat sheeted down Marcus’s back, and the constant, punishing heat and damp were like a blanket pressed over his face. He was aware of Kit off to his left, but he didn’t dare glance over to see what the old actor was doing.

“Why would it want its enemies to flank it? I don’t see how it could defend against us both,” Kit said.

“Same reason you’d put yourself between sheep,” Marcus said. “Lets you put your full attention on the one you’re killing. Can we talk about this later?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

Marcus shook his sword, and the beast’s eyes flickered toward it. Its pupils were cat slits, its nose two flat pits like a viper’s. Its chest widened and narrowed as it sucked in air. Smelling them. Gathering information. Making its decision.

Marcus shouted, driving toward the beast with a flurry of stabs. Even in the relative clear, there was little room to swing, and the reach of his blade was the only advantage he had. The beast swiped at the sword, parrying the thrust with a power that almost wrenched the hilt out of his hand. Marcus stepped back, waiting to see if his plan had worked. The beast licked its paw, its tongue the bright red of fresh blood.

“Didn’t know it was sharp along the sides too, did you, kitty?” Marcus said. “I’ve got all kinds of tricks like that. So how about we just call this one a draw and move on, eh?”

The beast screamed, swatting with its wounded paw. Red splattered across Marcus’s bare chest, but it was his attacker’s blood. Its evil-colored eyes flickered past Marcus’s shoulder, weighing the possibility of Kit. Marcus shifted to the side, keeping himself between the animal and the man. The beast hissed annoyance, and for a moment Marcus thought it might turn away, blending back into the shadows of Lyoneia as unnervingly as it had emerged from them. Nothing in its stance warned what was coming; in one heartbeat it went from half turned away, single petulant eye considering him, to full assault. The rush of flesh and bone, tooth and claw, left no room for mercy. Marcus felt the shout in his own throat, but he couldn’t hear it. He pushed forward, into the attack. Retreat even in defense was death now. The shock of impact jarred his arm as the blade struck home, but the animal outweighed him, and no wound however grievous could stop its charge. The smell of the beast filled the air, thick and rank and intimate, and the fur, slick and rough at the same time, pressed against him and bore him down. The filthy litter of the jungle floor pressed against Marcus’s back as the beast shifted, struggling to bring its vicious teeth against his head.

Somewhere very far away, Kit was shouting, but Marcus didn’t have the attention to spare. He pressed himself in, clasping the beast close, fighting to stay too near to let mouth or paw reach him. With the hand that still held the sword, he pushed and pulled and pushed again, widening whatever wound he had managed. The beast writhed against him, thrusting him away, and whipped its head against his own. Marcus felt the tooth pierce the top of his ear and rip through it. Later, it would hurt. A claw dug at him, trying to find the leverage to cut, and Marcus jumped back. The blood-slicked blade slipped from his fingers.

For a moment, they stood, facing each other. The beast curled against itself like a runner protecting a stitch. Marcus stayed low, feet grounded and knees bent, ready to jump away. Blood poured from the animal’s belly. It roared, snapping at the air, but it came no closer. Its eyes fixed on Marcus, then glazed and fixed on him again. Blood poured into Marcus’s ear and down his neck. Long ropes of saliva draped down from the animal’s panting jaw. Flies were already buzzing around them, drawn by the smells of violence and death.

The beast coughed once, and then a sudden gout of blood shot out from its mouth and nostrils, bright red against the black muzzle. It slipped to the ground, folding its legs underneath it as if merely resting, and its dark eyes closed. Marcus took a long, shuddering breath.

“Well,” he gasped. “Hope those don’t travel in packs.”

Kit stood at the far side of the clearing, his walking stick held above him like a club, his face pale and his hair standing out from his head in all directions. Marcus’s legs began to shake, and he sat down. He’d been in the business of violence long enough to know how this would go. A half hour’s time and he’d be fine, but until then trying to will himself to normalcy only made it worse. He touched his wounded ear. The rip was rough at the edges and as long as the first joint of his thumb. He was lucky it hadn’t gotten more than a single tooth to bear, or the beast might have torn the whole damn thing off. The flies buzzed around him, sliding in to drink up the gore.

“Are you all right?” Kit asked.

“Had better days,” Marcus said. “Had worse, for that. If you’ve still got that salve in your pack, I’d take a couple fingers’ worth.”

Kit hurried back into the trees and returned with the pale leather pack, one of the few objects that hadn’t yet rotted in the jungle. Marcus opened the stone jar and scooped a double finger through the yellow-white salve. It burned like fire when it touched the wound, but it would keep the maggots out.

For weeks, they had battled the land, following animal trails that widened for a hundred feet and then vanished as if they’d never been, avoiding Southling hunters who haunted the nights, and spending as much time scraping for food and water as searching for the reliquary. Kit’s face had lost all its cushion, the skin growing gaunt against the bone. Marcus was fairly sure he’d lost a tenth of his own body’s weight, and he still had a bit of potbelly. The indignities of not dying young.

“I believe I’ve heard of these,” Kit said, staring at the animal. “Kaskimar, they’re called where I came from, but … they were much smaller.”

The actor reached out with his walking stick to prod the corpse.

“Don’t touch it,” Marcus said, a breath too late.

The black eyes clicked open and a paw lashed out. The walking stick flew out of Kit’s hand, cracking against a tree trunk. Kit fell back with a curse, and the beast closed its eyes again.

“Sorry,” Marcus said. “Should have said before. Did it get you?”

“I’m afraid so,” Kit said ruefully. “I may need needle and thread.”

“That deep?” Marcus said, levering himself to his feet. “Let me see—”

“No,” Kit said sharply. “Stay back. It isn’t safe. Just throw me the pack and then get away.”

“Get away?”

Kit nodded, licked his lips, and winced. Marcus thought he saw something tiny and black skitter across Kit’s arm, and his flesh crawled a little.

“It’s the spiders,” Kit said. “There’s too many of them to keep track of. It won’t be safe for you.”

Marcus tossed the pack to Kit’s side and made his way to the other side of the dying beast. The shaking was already less. Kit grunted in pain and started pulling their few supplies out and onto the ground before him.

“How bad are the bites from those things?” Marcus asked

“Hmm? Oh. They raise welts. Itch for a few days.”

The beast took a deep, shuddering breath and didn’t draw another. In a few minutes, Marcus guessed, it would be safe to retrieve his sword.

“Hardly seems fair that they bite you,” Marcus said. “Disloyal, somehow.”

“I don’t believe they know who I am. What I am, for that. I doubt they have minds themselves, even so much as a normal spider might. They act as the mark of the goddess’s authority and the channel for her gifts.”

“Which is why we’re killing her,” Marcus said. “So her power and gifts all go boneless.”

“Yes.”

“Still seems rude of them to bite you.”

“Annoying, yes. But that isn’t why they’re unsafe. I’m using the last of the salve.”

“Use it if you need it. Might as well use nothing as not enough. Why unsafe, then?”

Kit took a sharp breath, his hand pressed to the the wound in his leg. His face paled and the red-black blood that ran between his fingers might have been thick with clots or something less pleasant. A yellow frog, long-legged and shining like a river stone, leaped onto the dying beast’s head, then off again. The animal didn’t stir.

“One might … God, but this does sting, doesn’t it? Ah. One might get inside you.”

“Inside me?”

Kit looked up and managed a smile.

“I wasn’t born with them,” he said. “If I hadn’t been chosen for the temple, I’d be herding goats in the Sinir Kushku today instead of this.”

“Better off too,” Marcus said. “How do they get inside you?”

Kit fumbled on the ground. The black roll of silk thread had a fine bone needle in it, and Kit held it between his teeth, talking around it as he found the free end of the thread. It slurred his words, but not so badly that Marcus couldn’t understand him.

“For me, it was the ritual initiation. I spent five years learning before my mind was ready, or that’s what the high priest told me, and I believed him. I suppose I still do, for that. I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would be to have the goddess enter you if you were unprepared. It only took one. I cut my skin just inside the elbow, and the high priest cut his thumb and pressed it to my wound. That was all. I felt it come in me, felt it crawling through my veins, and then the next day, there were more. Everywhere, and I knew I was changing. I remember embracing it at the time, but we were always warned that the goddess would break an unready mind. Even as it was, there was a day my brothers had to strap me down to keep me from trying to open my skin and let them out.”

“I think I’ll stay with the usual empty prayers and overpriced candles,” Marcus said. “And that could happen to anyone? And when I say anyone, I mean that could happen to me?”

Kit made a little grunt of satisfaction, holding the needle in one hand and gently rolling the thread through its eye. The tiny, sharp shard of bone danced between his fingers, seeming to fly in the dimness like a cunning man’s conjure. With a sigh, he took it between finger and thumb and turned to the work of sewing his skin closed. Tending your own wounds like that was unpleasant, but sometimes the times required it.

“They wouldn’t intend to. It isn’t as though they seek for it,” Kit said. “But if you were unlucky, one might find its way into your blood. A cut would be the simplest, but any path under your skin would do, I think. Eyes. Mouth. Less mentionable paths. I haven’t made the experiment, but that’s what they told me in the temple, and it seems plausible.”

“So it’s never happened?”

“Once,” Kit said, “when I was very new to the world. It was an accident. I was in Borja, and I was drunk. I got into a fight. Not a serious thing; fists, not knives. But I split his lip, and then later on, he bit me. They decided a demon had possessed him, and they threw him on a bonfire.”

“Seems extreme.”

“I convinced them it was called for.”

Kit said the words lightly, but his closed expression spoke of shame. He drove the bone needle through his skin again, pulling the dark thread until the wound narrowed. Tiny red dots marked his hands and the skin of his leg. Spider bites.

Marcus stepped forward, but not too close. Flies were drinking at the corners of the beast’s closed eyes, and he shooed them away. The animal seemed, if anything, heavier in death. Marcus rolled it onto its wide back. His sword stuck out of its chest at an angle, thick with gore and insects. So little time, and the jungle was already hard at work reclaiming the animal, remaking it, folding it into the merciless cycle of eater and eaten. He took hold of the hilt, braced his foot, and heaved. The sword came free on the third try. He squatted on the ground, rubbing the worst of the blood off with moss and old leaves. In a perfect world, he’d have been able to wash it with a real cloth and oil it after. He considered the beast’s body, shrugged, and ran the flat of the blade across the slick black fur. There would be some body oils in the pelt. It wasn’t the most dignified way to treat a fallen enemy, but it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done to the animal that day. He put the sword back into its rotting leather scabbard.

Kit finished his gruesome task and tried standing. It looked awkward and painful. Marcus felt himself making the calculations. If Kit’s wound went septic, getting back to friendly territory would be a hard thing. Kit could likely talk any Southlings they came across into giving them aid, providing the man was still coherent and not lost in a fever. If it was all up to Marcus, their chances would be worse.

And even then, there was only so much longer they could go on before the landscape consumed them. They would become another cautionary tale to excite the interest of explorers and idiots. Any man who cared about his own life would turn north now and hope he hit seawater before his strength gave out. Only that wasn’t the job.

“We can make camp here,” Marcus said.

“And spend all night fighting ants and scavengers?”

“We can make camp a way down from here. Maybe find a little creek.”

“I think that sounds wise,” Kit said. “Let me get my staff.”

While Kit limped into the underbrush to retrieve the fallen stick, Marcus knelt by the dead animal. It was magnificent in its way.

“Your time now, kitty,” he said under his breath. “My time later.”

He patted the beast’s shoulder like it was an opponent he’d bested in the gymnasium’s fighting pit, then started to stand. He stopped. The ground near the great black claws had been churned up, black earth and pale roots. Marcus dug his fingers down, pulling up the fabric of plant and soil. The stone beneath it was a perfect green. Only it wasn’t stone.

“Kit?”

“Marcus?”

“There’s dragon’s jade here.”

Kit hobbled forward, leaning against his staff. His face was grimy and streaked with his own blood, but his eyes were bright.

“Where?”

Marcus stood up and stepped back, pointing to the turned earth. As Kit knelt down to examine it, Marcus walked up and down the clearing, squinting in concentration. All around them, great trees towered up, fighting each other to reach the sunlight. But here in this strip, the trees were thinner, shorter, weaker. The roots that fed them, perhaps shallower. Yes, now that he knew to look for it, it was clear.

“This is a road,” he said. “There’s a dragon’s road running through this valley. North to south, and maybe turning a little to the east just here.”

“Well, now,” Kit said. “There’s a pleasant surprise.”

“Did we expect to find a dragon’s road?”

“We did not.”

“And if there’s dragon’s road, it seems likely that at some point way back when there were still dragons to make the jade, it was a road to someplace.”

“That would seem to follow.”

Marcus felt a smile plucking at his lips.

“This is the path to your mysterious reliquary, isn’t it?”

Kit hauled himself up.

“I suppose it could be.”

For a long moment, the two men stood in the cloud of flies that buzzed around the corpse, grinning at each other like boys.

Cithrin

Magistra Isadau’s office was near the center of the compound. It was as understated as Cithrin’s back room in the café had been, but like a stone set in tin or else silver, the surroundings changed the nature of the space. Where Cithrin’s workplace was clearly built on business, Isadau drew anyone coming on bank business through her house. After meeting with Cithrin in Porte Oliva, a person would step out to see the Grand Market with its queensmen and merchants, traders and cutpurses, shouts and laughter and commerce. Leaving Isadau’s meant passing through not only the magistra’s home, but her brother’s, her sister’s, her mother’s. Isadau’s nieces and nephews wandered the wide hallways with their friends or else their tutors. Mother Kicha had visitors every day, so that even in the afternoons, the broad hall outside the matriarch’s bedchamber might be half full of poets or priests or sour-faced Timzinae women embroidering flowers and sunbursts onto dresses and pointedly ignoring Cithrin.

Jurin—the brother—was a farrier, and the stables were his as much as Isadau’s. Kani, who had met Cithrin at the docks, did scribe work for the bank and deliveries for Jurin and errands for her mother without drawing any distinction between them. Yardem and Enen and Roach were expected to work with Isadau’s own guardsmen, sharing the duties of the watch and escorting payments through the city, and they were also guests welcome at the family dinner table. The kitchens smelled of fennel and cumin and cinnamon, and they fed anyone who came. The cook who oversaw them, an old Yemmu man with a black crack running jaggedly through his left tusk, made a great noise and wailing about being interrupted and then kept whoever had come in conversation harder to escape than a honey trap.

There was no tradition of wayhouses in Suddapal. Travelers negotiated hospitality with whatever family opened their doors to the knock. Coming out of her room in the morning was like stepping into the street had been in Porte Oliva. Anyone might be there on any business. And Magistra Isadau’s complex—while larger and better appointed than most—was only one of hundreds that made up the five cities. In the first days, Cithrin could feel her own mind shifting, struggling to put the culture of Elassae into terms of her old experience. The compounds were like villages of a single family, each in competition with the ones around it. Or the compounds were like homes shared through a greater family and in service to all the endeavors the men and women of that family fell into. Or they were like the holdings of the nobility, except without the base of taxation and tribute to hold them up. It was only very slowly and with almost as many steps back as forward that Cithrin came to accept the compound for what it was, and even then it felt profoundly foreign. Nor was its openness the only difference.

“Hold your shoes, ma’am?” Yardem asked.

Tenthday was a moving ceremony, falling on each of the traditional seven weekdays with a mathematical certainty that was like music. Callers marched out from the basilica at dawn, ringing bronze bells and singing the call to prayer. The pious like Mother Kicha and Jurin, and those who wished to be thought well of by the pious, like Isadau and Cithrin, all met the callers barefoot in the streets and joined the procession.

“Thank you,” Cithrin said, handing the leather slippers to Yardem. “This will be more pleasant in the summer when the paving feels less like ice.”

The Tralgu’s wide, canine mouth took on a gentle smile.

“Imagine it will,” he said. His own wide leather boots hung in his hand. Roach stood beside him, his race making him seem more a part of the household than of Cithrin’s guard. Enen was staying behind; there was a whole genre of jokes about what people found at home after the ceremony. Leaving some family behind was considered an acceptable compromise between the worship of God and the nature of humanity. The callers came, bells breaking like waves against the low bass chanting of voices. Cithrin sighed, stood the way Master Kit and Cary had taught her, and joined the household as they stepped into the street. The steady pace allowed even the oldest among them to keep up, and Cithrin let her mind wander as they passed through the wide streets of Suddapal. The group was mostly Timzinae, but the massive bodies of Yemmu lumbered among them, as well as the tall and tall-eared Tralgu. Cithrin was the only Cinnae or Firstblood; her pale skin and hair stood out like a star in the night sky, and she caught more than a few people craning their necks for a glimpse of the newcomer. She tried not to feel awkward about it.

The city here sloped down to the south. The sea was a greater whiteness behind sun-glowing mist. The sky was pale as opal.

Magistra Isadau appeared at her side, and Cithrin nodded formally. Some swift calculation seemed to pass behind the older woman’s eyes before she returned the gesture.

“You’re looking well this morning, Cithrin.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said over the chant and the bells.

“I saw that you’d begun your review of the books?”

“I have,” Cithrin said, then looked around her. They were where the private business of the bank would be overheard if spoken of, and yet the magistra’s comment felt like an invitation. Cithrin felt a tightening in her gut, like a rat smelling a dog, but not sure yet which direction held the danger. “I’ll want to look over them more this afternoon.”

“I suspect we can make time for it,” Isadau said. “There are some people I would like you to meet after the ceremony.”

Cithrin smiled carefully.

“Whatever you think wise,” she said, keeping her tone cheerful.

“Ati Isadau!” a voice called from behind them. A younger Timzinae boy—thirteen summers or possibly a bit less—was pushing his way through the crowd toward them. Men and women made way for him with expressions of annoyance. He reached them winded, one black-scaled hand clutched to his side. “Ati Isadau,” he said between gasps. “There’s a courier come. Package for you. From the holding company.”

Isadau’s smile seemed warm enough that she might actually have meant it.

“Thank you, Salan,” she said gravely. “I appreciate your letting me know.”

Salan, Cithrin thought. It took her a moment to recall where she’d heard the name. This was the nephew, son of Isadau’s brother, who’d decided to be infatuated with the exotic girl from Birancour. He looked at Cithrin, then tried to bow and walk forward at the same time. All in all, he managed creditably.

“Yes,” Cithrin said. “Thank you.”

The boy started to say something, lost the thread of it, and nodded in a sharp, curt way that was certainly intended to be manly. He fell in step between Cithrin and Isadau, escorting them to the temple.

“I’m studying to be a soldier,” Salan announced, apropos of nothing.

Yardem, at her other side, coughed once. No one who hadn’t traveled with him for years would have recognized the sound as amusement.

“Really?” Cithrin said.

“Entered gymnasium last year,” Salan said. “It’s a good one. It’s run by an old mercenary captain who fought in half the wars in the Keshet.”

“What’s his name?” Cithrin asked.

“Karol Dannien. Master Karol, we call him.”

Cithrin glanced at Yardem. The Tralgu’s expression was bland and blank, but his ears were tipped forward, listening. Her heart beat a little faster. His reaction to the words meant more to her than the words themselves.

“Really?” she said.

“I’ve been there for six months, and I’m already up to third rank,” Salan said proudly. “At the end of summer, Master Karol is taking the ten best fighters to Kiaria to try out for garrison duty. It won’t be me this year. Next year, probably.”

“Garrison duty would be hard work,” Cithrin said. Salan’s breast seemed to broaden with pride, and his expression took on a seriousness that it would have been unthinkably cruel to laugh at.

“Kiaria’s the old-style word for stronghold,” he said. “No one’s ever fought their way in there. Even during Falin’s occupation, Kiaria didn’t fall. And that lasted thirty years. Only the best fighters are allowed to work the garrison there. That’s what Master Karol said.”

“He would know better than I would,” Cithrin said. “Is the gymnasium close to the compound?”

“No, Master Karol’s down by the piers. He has all sorts of different people come through and help train. A month ago, he had a Haaverkin teach a session. Cep Bailan, his name was, and he taught me the tiger choke. You can knock a man unconscious in three breaths. If you do it right.”

The procession turned the last degree in its arc, and the basilica hove into sight. Granite walls rose to twice the height of even so large a man as Yardem, and then three heights more in dark-stained wood. Wide doors of iron-bound oak were open wide, and the chanters stood beside them making graceful figures in the air with wide-spread palms. Isadau put a hand on Salan’s head, the unconscious gesture of a woman to a child.

“Go find us a bench, won’t you?” she asked, and Salan trotted forward, pleased to have a task. Isadau smiled at Cithrin. “He’s terribly proud.”

“I could tell,” Cithrin said. “It’s not a bad thing, having a trade you care about.”

“I suppose. Still, I’d hoped he’d take to something less likely to have him killed. For a time, I thought he’d follow Jurin and be a farrier, but—”

“All respect, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Farriers die too. I’ve known several men that caught a hoof. And standing garrison at Kiaria, he’s more likely to die of boredom than a blade.”

Magistra Isadau set her gaze forward, watching Salan weaving through the crowd as they passed through the wide doors. She rubbed her fingers together, a dry, soft sound like the pages of a codex slipping against each other.

“I suppose that’s true,” she said. “Still, I could hope for something that reminds me less that he’s growing up.”

The interior of the basilica arched above them, vast as a mountain. The dark wood benches seemed to catch the light of the thousand candles, drink it in, and return it rich and mysteriously altered. The air was thick with the smell of ambergris, roses, and thick tropical mint, the warmth of bodies and candleflame. At the nave, a Timzinae priest stood beneath a massive rosewood dragon. The spread wooden wings dovetailed into the walls themselves, so that the whole basilica seemed to be within their span. The massive head had been fashioned with an expression of that could have been compassion or disdain. Or perhaps Cithrin was only seeing in it what she hoped and feared. Either way, it was nicely done.

They slipped into the outer edge of a bench, Yardem at her side. He handed her back her slippers, and she slid numbed and filthy toes into them, grateful that they could at least begin the journey back toward warmth. His own boots, he laid on the ground. The procession was still making its way in, the murmur of voices still growing within the wide and echoing space. Cithrin put her hand on his.

“Karol Dannien,” she said, not whispering—whispering always sounded like whispering, and so it caught attention—but speaking low. “Did you know him?”

“Did,” Yardem said. “It was years ago, though.”

“Still, he might know. He might have had word of Marcus. Captain Wester, I mean.”

“Might,” Yardem said, but his ears were pressing back against his skull and his forehead was furrowed.

“Will you ask?”

“I could,” Yardem said.

“I’m not angry with him,” she said, maybe too quickly. “He was in his rights to leave. His contract allowed it. It’s just … I wanted to talk with him. Say goodbye.”

Ask him why, she thought, though she would never say it.

Marcus Wester had been the captain of her guard, and before that, the man who’d taken her cause and kept her from being killed. That he’d left while she was gone north to Carse and Camnipol, that he’d stepped away from his work with the bank without so much as letter to explain his choice, shouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t answer to him, and he had kept the word of his agreements. But it irritated. Worse, it hurt.

She had her own work to do, her year’s apprenticeship under Magistra Isadau, and then her return to Porte Oliva and her own branch of the bank and, God help her, Pyk Usterhall. Whatever Marcus was doing, she wouldn’t have been part of it. And still, it would be something to know what had been so much more important than her.

Yardem nodded, and she thought she saw the same distress on his face. He had known Marcus much longer than she had, worked as his second, and even, she thought, taken some responsibility for seeing the captain through his worst times. She felt a passing guilt at reminding him that he had also been left behind. When Yardem spoke, his voice was low and his words as careful as painting eggshells.

“You know that the captain wouldn’t have left without … reason.”

“Probably,” Cithrin said. “And still, I’d like to know what called him away. Wouldn’t you?”

Yardem flicked an ear, his earrings jingling against each other.

“I’ll speak with Dannien,” he said. “See what I can find.”

Cithrin squeezed his fingers and took back her own hand. At the nave, the priest raised his hands, and the crowd went silent. The bells had stopped and a deep, throbbing gong sounded three times. The priest closed his hands, opening them again with a shout. Gouts of flame rose from his fingertips into the wide air, swirling gold and green. Yardem grunted. Returning Cithrin’s glance, he shrugged.

“Cunning men shouldn’t be priests,” he said so softly that only she could hear. “Too much temptation to show off.”

“Gaudy,” Cithrin agreed, as the priest’s reedy voice began to recite from the holy books. She set her expression into an attentive half-smile and let her mind wander.

The arrival of the courier, she forgot about completely until Magistra Isadau called for her that night.

Magistra Isadau sat with her legs crossed and her feet resting atop her desk. The night breeze left the lantern flickering. Her full attention was on a letter in the company cipher that she held in her left hand, so that for a long moment, she didn’t move or acknowledge Cithrin’s presence. When she did, she nodded toward a low upholstered divan. Cithrin sat. Magistra Isadau tapped the papers against her fingertips. In the dim light, the darkness of her scales left her expression unreadable.

“In Carse,” she said, “Paerin argued that Antea would pose little threat for years at the least. You disagreed.”

“I did,” Cithrin said.

Isadau held out the letter. Cithrin hesitated for a moment, then took it from her. The handwriting was unquestionably Paerin Clark’s, the cipher as familiar to her eye as normal script. The words, however, were in a different voice. We have met, but I cannot think you would remember me. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer not to identify myself to you at this time. She turned the page over, glancing at the script.

“It appears that someone else has reached your same conclusions,” Magistra Isadau said. “A faceless voice from the wilds. It happens more often than you’d imagine, and usually it’s someone half mad and in need of coin. But this time … Komme and Paerin addressed this to me, but they meant it for you.”

Cithrin read the full letter from beginning to end, and she felt some part of herself that she hadn’t known was knotted relax. Her mind became stiller than it had been in weeks, clear and cold. For a time, she was in Camnipol, walking the streets that the letter spoke of as best her memory would allow. Detail grew upon detail: prisons, food supplies, the manufacture of weapons, the rising tide of violence against the poor and the powerless, the resentment of the Timzinae conspiracy in which neither she not the letter’s author had the slightest belief. In the end, she folded the letter and looked into the dancing flame of the lantern. She didn’t see it. She was elsewhere. She was in the darkness and the dust, hiding with Aster and Geder, working puzzles about the ancient dragons and the wars long past. If the Geder Palliako she’d known was taking these steps, what would he mean by them? For a moment, she saw him again as he had been the last time they’d been together: in the street smelling of vomit and another man’s blood, trying awkwardly to invite her to stay for tea.

She shuddered.

“Was there a question Komme wanted to ask me about this?”

“Not specifically. Your impression of the author. Whether your experience matched what he says.”

“It does,” Cithrin said. “As to the writer … The details are all as I’d expect, or near enough. The conclusions seem sound. I’ve only been in Camnipol once, and that was under peculiar circumstances, but this description is more plausible for me than the one Paerin gave.”

“So you would trust the source?”

“Not without knowing who it is, no,” Cithrin said. “But I’d read the next letter carefully and treat it with respect. And I’d prepare for another Antean war, though I couldn’t say against whom.”

“Sarakal,” Isadau said, rising from her chair. “The report came in from friends of Komme in Asinport that Lord Skestinin’s fleet had sailed east and south. Komme expects Antea will march early in the spring if they haven’t already.”

Cithrin felt a deep dread welling up in her breast, but she only nodded.

“What is the bank’s position?”

Isadau nodded, her chitinous lips pressing together.

“We’ve taken contracts on supplies. Food, of course. And we bought out any insurance contracts for caravans heading north and invested in three roundships that will be ready to offer an alternate route.”

“And the local coin and spice? Will we be moving it?”

Isadau shook her head.

“Antea can’t win against Sarakal,” she said. “The traditional families pester each other and play out their vicious little intrigues, but nothing unites them like a common enemy. At the height of its power, the Antean Empire found it easier to respect the border than challenge it, and whether the new Lord Regent recognizes it or not, Antea is weakened. There may well be a long and bloody fight. The borders may shift. It’s unlikely that Nus will change hands, though I suppose it’s possible. There will doubtless be starvation and blood on both sides, but Sarakal won’t fall.”

“You don’t think he’ll come here, then?”

“Even the great rulers are constrained by the world,” Isadau said. “The empire’s ambitions may be vast and ill-considered, but there are still only so many men, so many horses, so many siege engines, and there’s a great deal of territory in Sarakal that will resist being passed through. If the armies of Antea come to Suddapal, it will be because the nature of the world has changed in a way that hasn’t happened since the dragons fell. So no, they won’t come here. Not in my lifetime, and not in yours.”

Clara

The end of the winter’s hunt had always been a difficult and pleasant time. The long, dark weeks drew near their end, and Dawson returned from whatever corner of the empire his friend and king had taken him. He would come back to the holdfast at Osterling Fells exhausted and moody and spend the better part of a week complaining that the journey back to Camnipol for the opening of the season was coming too soon, that there was too much work to be done on his lands. The progress of every improvement and renovation would be weighed and found wanting, the questions of justice that had waited for his word would be answered and justice meted out, and slowly, his shoulders would relax, his smile become easier. He claimed it was the comfort of being at home and with her, but it was also anticipation. She remembered lying in bed with him, their bodies pleasantly spent, and listening to the gossip from the hunt and the dripping of melting ice. Her husband was a prickly man, loyal as a dog and proud as a cat, and he found the guiding star of his life in preserving the world against change. The fears that haunted his worst nights had always been that his children might inherit a kingdom debased from the one he had been given and that his wife might be discontent. When the time came to leave the Fells for their compound in the city, he was champing at the bit to resume the battles and intrigues of court. It was the work he’d been born to.

And so every spring, Dawson would go through the holdings one last time, giving orders and coin, instructions to his vassals that would take them through another summer and guide the lands that he protected safely to autumn. Every spring, husband and wife would travel the dragon’s road back to Camnipol, the rhythm of the team’s hoofs creating martial music as the couple leaned against one another in the well-cushioned carriage. Every spring, she would take charge of the house and see it washed and cleaned and cared for while he snuck out, sheepish and delighted as a boy, to the Fraternity of the Great Bear to drink and smoke and debate with his friends and his enemies.

Every spring until this one.

Clara had seen the first arrivals. The grand carriages of Lord Flor clattering along the black cobbles inside the southern gate, ribbons trailing from it and a crier on horseback clearing its path. Lady Flor, who had more than once sat in Clara’s withdrawing room and shared the intimate details of her husband’s infidelities, had been looking out the window. Perhaps she hadn’t recognized the grey-cloaked woman walking through the street as her old friend. Perhaps she had. That had been three days ago. Winter’s grip loosened, and the court returned to Camnipol.

Clara listened to the familiar knock at her door. Her thin wooden door hardly robust enough to keep the wind out. Not Vincen’s tapping, but the proprietary rap of his cousin Abatha.

“M’lady, I know you’re in there.”

“I am indisposed,” Clara said.

“Second day running you said that,” Abatha said. “Vincen’s worrying you’ve got lady troubles.”

Clara laughed despite herself.

“How delicate of him,” she said.

The wooden flooring creaked as the keep shifted her weight.

“I don’t like to mention it,” Abatha said, and then didn’t go on. She didn’t need to. The rent was due, and Clara didn’t have the coin to pay.

“Yes, thank you,” Clara said, still not rising from her bed. “I will see it taken care of.”

The creaking footsteps went away toward the kitchen and left Clara alone. Pale, soiled sunlight shouldered its way through the oiled parchment of the window. Clara’s body felt heavy and it ached at the joints, but she hauled herself to sitting and rested her head in her hands. Her skin stuck to itself and her hair fell lank at her shoulders. She had to go to Lord Skestinin’s little estate and collect her allowance. She couldn’t say whether she hoped that Jorey and Sabiha, her natural son and more recent daughter, had come back yet or dreaded it.

Whatever the case, it had to be done.

“Enough,” she chided herself. “Just … enough.”

An hour later, she emerged from the rooms as if stepping into Camnipol fresh from Osterling Fells. A bit of ribbon held her hair in place. Her dress—one of the few to survive the insurrection—was a bit out of fashion, but the cut flattered and the hem was clean. Thankfully, Vincen had gone to the butcher’s for his cousin and Clara could make the walk alone without having to argue. Likely she wouldn’t have been able to explain why she wanted her two lives kept separate this way, apart from the fact that she did.

That her son had returned became obvious as soon as she approached the mansions. They were modest almost to the point of self-effacement, but fresh banners flew above the door and no moss or lichen marred the stone façade. The windows stood open to the breeze, yellow curtains billowing from one of the second-floor windows where a servant hadn’t made them fast. A Yemmu door slave she didn’t recognize stood in the entrance, fixed to the wall with a ceremonial silver chain. Black-inlaid designs decorated the tusks that rose from his lower jaw. Clara smiled at him as she approached.

“My lady,” the man rumbled. Bowed almost double, he still stood as high as her shoulder. “How may I serve?”

“I’ve come to see Jorey Kalliam, if he’s available,” she said.

“Yes, my lady. And who may I say is calling?”

It was an excellent question, and one with several answers.

“His mother,” she said.

Sunlight streamed through the sitting room’s windows, and a cheerful little fire popped and muttered in the grate. The clean smells of vinegar and soap felt almost like coming home after the months in Abatha’s boarding house, and Clara let herself relax for a moment. A Firstblood servant girl brought in a cup of coffee and a crust of sweetbread. Clara nodded her gratitude and tried not to consume it all too quickly.

The person who stepped through the doorway wasn’t her son. Sabiha Kalliam, once Skestinin, wore a simple gown of pale yellow that warmed the tone of her skin. Her hair draped about her shoulder, its softness at odds with the thinness of her lips and the solidity of her gaze. Clara stood, uncertain for a moment and afraid, before the girl stepped forward and embraced her. She smelled of mint and chamomile, and the warmth of her flesh felt like walking into summer. Clara felt an anxiety she hadn’t known she carried drop away.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, and then ran out of words.

The moment passed, and the two women stepped apart and sat. Clara found herself wanting to take Sabiha’s hand, to preserve the moment of contact a little longer, but the seating arrangements didn’t allow it.

“Jorey will be along soon,” Sabiha said. “How have you been?” The hardness in her voice sounded almost like regret. Clara gestured vaguely.

“Some days are better than others. Much as one might expect, I suppose. I have taken the liberty of stopping by and seeing my grandson. They’ve named him Pindan, which is apparently some sort of family name.”

“My uncle that died,” Sabiha said. “How is he? My … How is my son?”

“He’s a boy,” Clara said, chuckling. “He eats his own weight when he isn’t fasting, gets everywhere he ought not be, and thinks it hilarious to smear mud on people’s legs.”

Sabiha’s cheeks flushed and she nodded. For a man of the court, an illegitimate child might be an annoyance or even an opportunity to boast. Lords had been known to take their bastards as squires or put them into the more lucrative sorts of trade. It was one of many little asymmetries between the sexes.

“And you?” Clara asked. “I haven’t seen you since you left for the season.”

Sabiha lifted her eyebrows and looked down.

“Jorey thought it important that we attend the hunt,” she said. “My father agreed. It was … I don’t know. It was long, tiring, humiliating, and hard. Jorey does what he can to take the worst of it on himself, but it wore on him. He didn’t sleep well, and I don’t know whether the feasts we weren’t welcome to chafed more than the ones he attended.”

“Poor boy,” Clara said, fitting a river of melancholy into the two words. Jorey was her youngest son, and in some ways the one of her children the world had been cruelest with. Vicarian was safely in the church. Barriath, before he left, had been in battles, but only at sea and never particularly vicious ones at that. Jorey had helped to slaughter a city, and the ghosts of it walked behind him. The guilt had driven him to marry Sabiha in hopes of cleansing her name, and instead of raising her up, he had made her position in the court less tenable. Clara thought her son’s spine was made of pure enough metal to stand the strain. She hoped so.

“Some days were better,” Sabiha said.

“And you?” Clara asked, drawing her pipe from her pouch and filling the bowl with a pinch of cheap tobacco. “God alone knows this can’t have been easy for you either.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Sabiha said, her smile thin and oddly cruel. She took a twig from the fire and offered Clara the ember for her pipe. “I’m used to people pointing at me and whispering down their sleeves. I suppose I’m glad it’s not my past their amusing themselves with. It hasn’t left me with a deeper love of the court in general, though.”

“I imagine not,” Clara said, and drew the smoke into her lungs.

The pause was not entirely comfortable. Sabiha moved her head in one direction and then the other, testing out words without speaking them. Clara waited, knowing well how such things took their own time. The young woman’s hands relaxed just before she spoke.

“I don’t know how to help him.”

“Mother!” Jorey said, pushing through the door. His smile looked almost genuine. Clara rose into his arms. Regret that he hadn’t waited just a few minutes more was washed away by the scent of his hair and the strength in his arms around her. Her little boy had grown to a man, but she would always see him as infant sitting up by himself for the first time, an expression of wordless triumph on his dough-soft face. Holding him, she was neither the widow of a traitor she had been nor the half-formed woman she was becoming, but only the mother of her child. It was enough.

The moment passed and he pulled away.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

“And also you, dear,” Clara said. “Sabiha’s been telling me that the hunt was as much a masculine bore as ever, and I was acting as though I missed it.”

“I didn’t think you ever went,” Jorey said, sitting at his wife’s side. Clara took her own seat, gesturing with her pipe.

“It seemed polite to pretend,” she said. Jorey laughed, and Sabiha looked for a moment surprised before she smiled herself. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve come begging.”

“Of course,” Jorey said. “I’m sorry we didn’t leave you better provisioned. But—”

“I have been quite content with what I’ve had,” Clara said. And then, with a bit of effort to keep her tone light, “One of your father’s huntsmen has taken me a bit under his wing. Vincen Coe.”

“Father’s private man?” Jorey said. “The one who always went with him when he was intriguing against Feldin Maas?”

“Yes, him,” Clara said, silently regretting having mentioned him. Only she didn’t want it to seem as if she’d been hiding him if Jorey found out through some other channel, and now that he was back home it was so much more likely that he would, and damn it if she didn’t feel the beginning of a blush rising in her cheeks. “His cousin has a boarding house, and she’s been kind enough to give me a very pleasant room. Not the best neighborhood, but what is, these days?”

She pretended to catch an ember in her throat, coughing to explain the redness of her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the subterfuge, though the last time had certainly been a decade or more ago. Jorey called for a servant girl to bring a cup of water, and by the time Clara had drunk it down, she had her composure again.

“I’m sorry,” she said, seeming to apologize for the coughing fit but meaning something more diffuse.

“Are you feeling better?” Jorey asked, and she wasn’t certain what he meant by the question. She answered the simplest option.

“Yes, dear. Just breathed in something I oughtn’t.”

“I was hoping to see you,” Jorey said. “I’m looking at ways to bring the family back into favor.”

“I can’t imagine that will be easy.”

Jorey held up a hand, asking her to hear him out.

“Geder came to me,” he said. “He … apologized to me, in a way. I think despite everything he’d open to rehabilitating me within the court.”

“And would you be open to that?” Clara said, more tartly than she’d intended.

“If he’ll have me,” Jorey said. Sabiha took his hand as if she were comforting a child, but he took no notice. His voice had the light cadence of conversation, but his gaze grew distant. “Geder is Lord Regent. He’s the nearest thing we’ll have to a king until Aster comes of age, and that’s years from now. We’ve lost the holding and the mansions. Barriath’s gone. I’m living on the sufferance of my wife and her father, and you’re in a boarding house, living off the scraps from that. Geder doesn’t associate me with what Father did, even if everyone else does. He can put me in position to win a name back.”

“So you’d forgive him,” Clara said.

“No,” Jorey said, “but I don’t see that it matters. The world isn’t what it was a year ago. I have to take care of you and Sabiha. I want to wake up in a bed I own. I want Sabiha treated with respect. I want you invited to all the occasions that they’ve excluded you from. If I have to kneel down before a man I hate in order to do that, it’s a small price.”

He shrugged, and it was the motion he had always had. A gesture she had felt when he’d still been in the womb. Clara smiled and nodded, then turned her eyes to Sabiha. The dread in the girl’s expression was like looking to a mirror.

I don’t know how to help him either, she thought.

Might be a blessing,” Vincen Coe said.

“Odd sort of blessing,” she said and sipped at her beer.

The taproom went by the name Yellow House, and it stood at the edge of the Division just by the Silver Bridge. The sun had only just set, and the torches that lit the courtyard radiated heat without going so far as to warm her. But the drink was cheap and the soup wasn’t just water and hope, so it would do.

“Puts him in places to hear things,” Vincen said. “Even just having him in the Great Bear would be enough to fill one of your letters every day or two. What the debates were, and who was arguing which side. Might even come to a place he’d know orders before they were sent.”

“No. I don’t want him to be part of this. Not directly, anyway,” she said, leaning close to him and speaking softly. “If I find myself invited to tea or a sewing circle because of his place in the court, I won’t be so rude as to refuse. But I won’t use him without his knowledge, and I won’t have him know.”

“I can respect that,” Vincen said.

“And I’m not going to send the army’s orders to the enemy. I’m not a traitor.”

“If you say so, m’lady,” Vincen said.

At the edge of the yard, a traveling theater company had set up their stage. A round-faced girl and an older man lit a hundred candles in tin reflectors set all along the stage’s edge. Beyond them, the deeper dark of the Division, and then the torches and lanterns of the far side, as distant, it seemed, as stars.

She drank the yeasty, thick beer and wondered whether she might be a traitor. Geder Palliako was, after all, the crown. His failure and the failure of the empire were difficult threads to tease apart. She had risked her own life for King Simeon, and without regret. If anything, she felt herself more a patriot now, standing against the crown, than she had standing with it.

But Jorey had been right. The world wasn’t what it was a year ago. The Severed Throne as she’d known it was gone. The buildings might be the same, the city, even the people, but the nature of the empire—its soul—had changed. It might be possible to betray this new empire and not what it had been. A loyal traitor, then? It seemed absurd and enticing both. She wondered whether one could be faithful to the past and yet not be bound by its rules. Perhaps it was only the beer, but the question seemed heavy with importance.

“Do you know—” she began, but Vincen shook his head and gestured toward the stage.

“Show,” he said.

A dark-haired woman had taken the stage, her smile haughty and wild.

“Come!” she cried, her voice filling the darkness. “Gather near, my friends, or if you are faint of heart, move on. For our tale is one of grand adventure. Love, war, betrayal, and vengeance shall spill out now upon these boards, and I warn you not all that are good end well. Not all that are evil are punished.” Clara felt her throat growing thick, her heart beating faster. The words seemed like a threat. Or worse, a promise. “Come close, my friends, and know that in our tale as in the world, anything may happen.”

Geder

The first battle of the war came at a garrison ten miles from the low hills that marked the border. Ice still clung to the edges of the creek, and snow lurked at the roots of the trees and the northern sides of the walls where the sun could not reach them. Lord Ternigan led the vanguard himself, waiting until midday when the sun offered the enemy no advantage. If the soldiers of the keep had taken the field, it would have been the work of an hour, but instead the iron and oak doors closed, and Ternigan’s men withdrew to prepare their brief and bloody siege.

“Why didn’t they just go around it?” Aster asked.

Geder tapped his lips with the reports, thinking. In truth, he’d been in the field considerably less than Ternigan had, and though he had read deeply on the theory, practice, and history of war, the analysis of men who’d spent more years conducting it was still sometimes obscure to him. He felt Aster deserved an answer, though, and he did his best.

“If you just go on, then you leave them at your back,” he said, fairly certain that was right. “An enemy you haven’t destroyed utterly could always regain strength and come at you.”

Aster’s brow ceased as the boy considered this, then he nodded.

“Go on,” the boy said. “Keep reading.”

The forces of Antea outnumbered the garrison keep by easily five men for every Timzinae or Jasuru, but the keep walls were well made and maintained. Ternigan began by sending a squad of archers and hawkers to the east to bring down any rider or bird sent to alert the enemy or call for aid. The siege engines were constructed in the dim evening just beyond arrowshot of the keep’s walls. In the night, Ternigan patrolled to slaughter the fleeing enemy, and caught and killed nearly a dozen. The priests that had come with the army spoke their sermon by firelight, and their words—that the destiny of Antea to bring peace to the world began here, that the spirits of the dead would ride with them in the morning and make their assault unstoppable, that the rising tide of war would lift them all to glory—so filled the men with lust for battle that Lord Ternigan had to argue against making a night attack.

In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents—

“Oh that’s nice,” Aster said.

“Ternigan’s reports do have a certain poetry,” Geder agreed. Basrahip, sitting a little apart, coughed out a short laugh.

In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents, Ternigan called the attack. The desperation and fear of the defenders came clear at the start. The rain of arrows and stones held no reserve, and a cunning man hidden in the keep’s walls threw great gouts of living flame from the keep’s single tower. The crew of a battering ram was lost to the flames before a bolt brought the cunning man down. When a second crew began to falter under the defenders’ arrows, Ternigan had called the charge, bringing the body of the army up behind them. With their own men blocking the path of retreat, the men’s resolve stiffened, and at the last, Ternigan dismounted, putting his own hand to the ram for the final dozen critical blows.

When the keep’s doors fell at last, Ternigan led the charge. There were few Timzinae and Jasuru in the keep, but they were wild with despair. Rooting them out took the better part of the day and took its toll in men, including Ternigan’s own squire. But the sun set on the banners of Antea flying above the conquered keep, and the first true victory of the war could now be unequivocally announced.

Geder folded the last page and dropped it on his desk. His private rooms in the heart of the Kingspire were grand and beautiful—carved stone and rich tapestry, wide vaulted ceilings. The gentle light of the afternoon sun filtered through the finest glass in the world. The scent of lavender and lamp oil filled the air. They were also home now, the place where Geder could retreat from the demands of the court. Here, he could rest at ease with his velvets undone and scratch himself when he itched. Aster sat at the great table where Daskellin had had a map of Sarakal, Elassae, the Free Cities, and southern Antea built. It wasn’t as detailed as the war rooms dedicated to the re-creation of the paths of armies and the death of cities, but it served as a good general reminder of the shape of things. Here was Nus, there the thin green threads of the dragon’s roads, at the southern edge the mountains that kept Sarakal from fading into Elassae, and the far city of Inentai that guarded the mountains’ end. Each keep and holdfast was marked by a tiny pewter model. Geder leaned forward, plucked the first of these from the dirt of the map, and put it back in place with the red banner of the spider goddess with its eightfold sigil flying from its minute rooftop.

“Do you think it’s true?” Aster asked.

“What bit?” Geder asked.

“Do you think it was really like that? With Lord Ternigan taking the battering ram and the frost on the tents and the cunning man calling up flames?”

“That part, I don’t know. The number of lost soldiers is probably accurate or nearly so. I have other men who can confirm all that. And how long it took to win the keep. The things that can be measured and counted, I don’t think he’d dare exaggerate. But the rest?”

“You think he lied?”

“I read a fair number of field reports from all through history,” Geder said, “and they didn’t match my experience.”

Aster glanced over at Basrahip, and the massive priest lifted his eyebrows.

Geder hadn’t known many children. Growing up, he had been the only child in the manor, and the boys and girls of the village had been only occasional companions. But even then, Geder thought that the patterns of age must be invisible to the people suffering them. Aster was his example. It was almost two years now since King Simeon had come and asked Geder to become protector of the prince. Geder could almost think that the boy he sat with now had been there, but that was an illusion. Aster had grown a bit taller, yes, but more than that, he had grown into himself. The planes of his face were still gentle, but not those of a child. Or at least not as often. He had become stronger too, leaner. There were still years before Aster became a man grown and took his crown, but Geder could see glimpses of that man. That king. It left him proud and melancholy both. If he was going to give Aster a world that was truly at peace for the first time since the dragons fell, he wouldn’t be able to rest, and there were days he would have liked nothing better than to sleep late, eat in the library, and nap in the sun. He had known that being Lord Regent would be a sacrifice. Even with all the power and status it gave him, carrying the weight of empire was only supportable because he was doing it for Aster.

That was what he told himself, anyway. He also could admit to himself that there were some parts of wielding power that he would miss, when the time came.

“Lord Palliako?” The old man bowed almost double as he came into the room. Ever since he’d come back after the insurrection with the courage to break from small traditions like letting other people bathe and dress him, Geder had gotten a reputation with the servants of the Kingspire. It made them much more respectful. “The general audience is ready, my lord.”

Geder stood, pulling his robes back into their best trim. Basrahip rose from his seat beside the window and stepped toward him, gentle for so large a man.

“All right, then,” Geder said. “Let’s clean this all up, shall we?”

When he turned toward the door, the servant’s face was pale. Geder glanced behind him, half expecting to see an assassin or a bee. Some sort of danger. There was nothing but the room.

“What? What’s the matter?”

The servant swallowed and coughed.

“Your crown,” Aster said, and Geder’s hand rose to his bare brow. “It’s back here.”

“Thank you,” Geder said, taking the metal circlet and putting it on. “How does it look?”

“Regal,” Aster said.

Geder struck an exaggerated pose. The boy prince laughed and Geder laughed with him.

The general audience was reputed to be one of the great chores of the regency. Over the long months of the winter, requests for audience had built up like water behind a dam: magistrates who wished to escalate their decisions to the highest possible authority, prisoners of the crown who wished to make a case for clemency, and the assorted small business of sitting the Severed Throne. Geder had never done the thing, never even attended one, and he looked forward to the enterprise.

The hall set aside for the general audience stood a hundred yards or so from the base of the Kingspire, and the massive presence of the building looming above gave the event a sense of grandeur that bordered on the ominous. The seat here was the actual Severed Throne, the ancient metal scarred where Bacian Ocur cut it and Annan the Forge made it whole. Or so tradition had it. The truth behind the legend was anybody’s guess.

From his seat, Geder looked out over a sea of faces. Gold and gems glittered from the arms and breasts of the nobles. The merchants wore furs and fine wool. And behind them, kneeling, what serfs, peasants, and prisoners had managed to convince the bureaucrats of the court that their issues merited the Lord Regent’s attention. His personal guard stood at his back, and palace guards lined the processional that led to him. Geder couldn’t help grinning, at least at first. The empire had brought its knottiest puzzles to him for judgment—the terms of land rights, the disposition of slaves, the judgment of crime, and the assessment of punishment. All manner of questions of justice waited for his mind to untangle, and whatever he decided right would become right by the mere act of his decision. In all, it seemed the best entertainment possible.

Only, of course, without Basrahip at his side, it would have been awful.

“Are you ready?” Geder asked.

“Yes, Prince Geder,” replied the priest, bowing. He lumbered down to his place in the closest row of observers, standing to the side, where Geder could see him. Geder felt a moment’s anxiety, worried that Basrahip might move out of earshot or be blocked by someone in the court. And then by the sense of being exposed. He had the sudden, powerful image of hidden archers loosing arrows at him where he sat. He never used to have worries like that. Another legacy of Dawson Kalliam. Eyeing the crowd with a wariness they didn’t deserve, he raised his hand, and the general audience began.

The issues came before him in order of precedence: the nobles first by rank, then the untitled of noble blood, ambassadors and foreign nobles with Antean family, then those without, then the merchant houses with letters of association, then those without, with mere people filling whatever time was left before king or regent grew too weary and postponed the rest until next year. Two illegitimate sons of a minor lord each claimed to have been promised the same dyeyard from their father’s estate. Geder had them both recount their versions of the tale, and then watched for Basrahip’s gentle nod or slight shake of the head. A Jasuru woman presented a contract that bound a local merchant to sell to her at a price lower than the market would otherwise provide him. The merchant swore the document was forged. Basraship’s tiny movements assured him that the document was genuine, but Geder made a show of asking probing questions and examining the document before he ruled, and for the crime of lying to the Lord Regent, he had the merchant taken to the new gaol for a month and his left earlobe cut off. With each issue put before him, Geder became more comfortable in his role as the dispenser of justice and wisdom. By the time they had reached the last of the merchant houses, he hardly needed Basrahip’s advice any longer. For hours, the assembly had watched him cut through lies and misrepresentations, finding the truth with the unerring skill of a hunting dog. He saw fear in the faces of the liars and respect in those whose fortunes he made whole. Really, there was nothing better.