The Widow's House

Cithrin

Spring came slowly to Porte Oliva. For weeks, the winter chill hung on, breaking for a day or two or three, and then descending again upon the city. The rains that washed the streets and pulled the grey from the clouds into the gutters had a meanness to them Cithrin didn’t remember. Stray cats huddled under the eaves, glaring out at the people passing by with the hungry resentment of beggars. She went through the motions of being the woman she pretended to be. Dinners and meetings, contracts and letters of transfer. It was a sham in more ways than one. She pretended to have power when she had none, and she pretended to care, though she didn’t.

Cithrin’s thoughts were always and only upon the war, and so when the conversations in the taprooms and alehouses changed to some other subject—when the trade ships from Narinisle would come, whether the queen in Sara-sur-Mar was going to make her Herez-born consort official, how the governor of the city had changed the tariffs in response to pressure from the free city of Maccia—it took her by surprise and left her annoyed. A year ago, Sarakal and Elassae had been nations. Today, they were subjects of the Severed Throne. For most of the merchants and tradesmen of Porte Oliva, it was only a curiosity. Or at most one factor among many in the private calculations of their work.

The ivy that grew up the side of the bank’s guard quarters was brown and dead-looking, except for pale, green-fuzzed dots that would turn to leaves and flowers in the coming weeks. The stalls of the Grand Market sold winter wheat and woolen cloaks, but also seeds and bulbs and the lighter jackets and leggings that would soon come into use. By summer, the men and women of the city would be nearly nude from the heat and the dampness of the sea and the bulbs would be tulip blossoms. Everything would change, as it always did. The thought comforted Cithrin less than it would have, once.

She had returned to her old apartment over the counting house with its thin floors and the stairway that went down the side of the building. She visited the taphouse that had been her regular haunt before Suddapal, before Camnipol, before Carse. She’d been welcomed by the same serving girl, served the same beer. It felt wrong that so little had changed in the city when so very much had been transformed for her. Yes, Magistra Isadau was in the city. No, Marcus Wester was not. Despite the changes, the city was so much itself, so confident in its permanence that she could almost believe that her travels and adventures had been only a long, complicated dream. That was how little the war had touched Porte Oliva up to now, and some days she could almost pretend it would last.

“The trade ships from Narinisle?” she said, leaning her elbows on the table. “A month, I’d guess. It depends on the blue-water trade, and that varies.”

“Will it affect the branch?” Isadau said, as she accepted the plate of sausage and onion that Yardem was offering her. The three of them were at the booth at the rear of the taphouse, half hidden from the common room by a sheer curtain of blue cloth with silver bells sewn to its edges.

“Not directly,” Cithrin said. “The money will come in like a tide, and that will lift us as much as anyone. But Pyk’s too frightened of risk to sponsor a ship. We might hold some insurance on cargo, but even that I imagine she’d keep to a minimum.”

“You sound as though you disapprove,” Isadau said.

“I do. But then she’d say I’m too reckless, so I suppose we’re even. At least we annoy each other.”

“Likely she was wise this year,” Yardem said. “The trade ships may not come at all.”

“That would be a pity,” Cithrin said. “Why not?”

“Pirates,” Yardem said. “Rumor at the gymnasium is they’ve elected some sort of king.”

“I thought that would be the king of Cabral,” Cithrin said bitterly. “God knows enough of the pirates have got noble blood.”

Yardem shook his head. “This is someone new. Came in and began organizing. Word is the pirates are halfway to being their own fleet.”

“Well-disciplined pirates?” Isadau said. “What’s the world coming to? Next we’ll have stones heading up in the sky like birds.”

The Timzinae woman was thinner than when Cithrin had first met her. The blackness of her scales was duller than it had been, and the inner eyelid stayed closed longer and more often than it had. She smiled and she laughed, but Cithrin could see the weariness pressing her like an illness. If there had been a way to lighten her burden, Cithrin would have done it, whatever it was, however much it cost her. Of all the refugees of Suddapal, Magistra Isadau was surely among the luckiest. The Medean bank was in cities across the world, and so Isadau had a place here, and in Northcoast and Narinisle and Herez. It wasn’t her own situation that dulled her eyes and sharpened her laughter. It was the war and what it had done to her race, her city, her home. It was the siege in Kiaria, still dragging on. It was Geder Palliako and the spider priests who drove him.

Cithrin felt the same.

“How did the governor’s dinner go?” Isadau asked.

“I pled a sick headache,” Cithrin said, then took a drink of her beer. It was stronger than the brews of Suddapal or Camnipol, and that was what she liked about it. It warmed her belly a little and loosened the knot there that kept her from sleep. In truth, she’d drunk herself to bed half the nights since she’d returned to Birancour, but it didn’t matter. She was always awake just after dawn, and if it had blunted her mind a little, it wasn’t as though Pyk’s covert and vicious control left much demand for her wits. She wiped her mouth with her cuff. “If I’d gone, it would have been true. The governor’s a terrible little man.”

“There might have been news,” Isadau said, her voice careful.

Cithrin hunched with guilt. “I’ll attend next time.”

In the common room, a boy cleared his throat and began a slightly off-key warble while an older man, clearly his father, hauled out a pair of puppets. The song was an old romantic ballad, but the words had been changed here and there to make the romantic conquests of the hero into something more martial. The puppets were a seducer and his prey, but they were also Imperial Antea and… well, and whoever got in its way, Cithrin presumed. Every now and then, she caught the singer’s gaze cutting back toward the little cove where she and Isadau sat. The piece had been chosen with them in mind, then. Know your audience, Kit would have said. Know them, and know how to flatter them. The piece told Cithrin something about how the city saw her. She tried to ignore it.

Isadau did not. Her gaze fastened on the little mannequins on their strings, and her eyes filled with tears. When she spoke, her voice was calm and matter-of-fact. “If he comes, he will kill us both.”

“All three,” Yardem said. “I’ll go first. Captain’d want it that way.”

Halvill stepped through the front door and shook the rain from his shoulders, blinking into the dim as his eyes adjusted. Cithrin took the opportunity to watch the other patrons watch the young Timzinae man. The truth was that Halvill had been in Porte Oliva at least as long as Cithrin had, and likely longer, back when they had called him Roach. But he was Timzinae, his new bride and their nearly arrived child natives of Suddapal. There was distaste in the keep’s expression, a distrust that had not been there before. Geder and his armies had changed what it meant simply to be a Timzinae. After all, no one liked to share cake with a leper.

It was hard to reconcile that Geder with the frightened man she’d hidden with in the days of the failed Antean coup. It was also very, very easy.

Halvill caught sight of the three of them and stepped to the booth. The little curtain jingled as he pushed it aside.

“Magistra Cithrin. Magistra Isadau. Yardem,” the guard said, nodding to each of them in turn. “The man from the holding company’s arrived.”

Paerin Clark sat in the counting house, leaning back on his stool. The slate on the wall behind him had marked odds back when the building had been a gambler’s stall. Now it listed the guard rotation. Pyk was just pouring a fresh cup of water for him when Cithrin and Isadau came in. The pale man smiled and nodded to them both.

“Paerin,” Isadau said, walking to him.

“Isadau,” he said, standing and taking the woman in his arms as a brother or dear friend might. “Ah, it’s been too long.”

“You should have come to Elassae more,” Isadau said, releasing him. “You look fatter. Chana has been seeing you fed.”

“She does watch after her investments. Cithrin.”

For a moment, Cithrin thought he might be about to embrace her too, and her body went stiff and awkward. But Paerin only nodded and smiled and sat back down. Pyk grudgingly poured out water for Isadau and Cithrin as well and then took her own low, sturdy seat. Cithrin sipped at the water to have something to do with her hands while Isadau sat across from Paerin. Paerin was Komme Medean’s son-in-law, and third in command of the holding company. Isadau was the voice of the Suddapal branch, which no longer existed. Pyk was nominally Cithrin’s notary, but under instructions to run the Porte Oliva branch. Cithrin had no clear idea where she stood in the hierarchy of people in the room.

“I’ve just come from Sara-sur-Mar,” Paerin said, “and a very short audience with her majesty the queen followed by a very long meeting with her master of coin.”

“That can’t have been pleasant,” Isadau said.

“It wasn’t,” Paerin said. “The opinion of the throne appears to be that the bank has filled her cities with impoverished refugees and brought her the displeasure of Imperial Antea.”

Pyk cleared her throat and spat. “Clear grasp of the obvious, that one.”

“Yes,” Paerin said. “It was hard to argue the facts. The more interesting issue was what remedy we intended to offer her.”

Cithrin’s belly went tight. “Handing me back to Geder won’t stop him.”

“That wasn’t on the table.”

“Bullshit.” Pyk chuckled.

“I took it off the table,” Paerin said. “It was never a serious proposal. If we started handing over our people, we wouldn’t have anyone manning the branches before long.”

“She wants a payoff, then?” Pyk said.

“Her master of coin was kind enough to call it a loan, but that’s what it comes to, yes,” Paerin said, and in Cithrin’s memory, Magister Imaniel said, We never lend to people who feel it is beneath their dignity to repay.

When Isadau spoke, her voice was tight and passionate. “If we spent every coin we have from every branch standing against those bastards, it would be cheap.”

Paerin Clark’s eyes were soft. He sipped his water, leaned forward, and let his stool’s legs return to the ground. “With respect, Magistra Isadau, the bank doesn’t see it that way.”

Isadau’s face went still and her inner eyelids fluttered in distress. Cithrin stepped forward, putting herself between the Timzinae woman and Paerin Clark by instinct. “Are you going to give them the money?”

“We can’t,” Paerin said. “If the holding company were to offer a loan to the throne of Birancour, we’d wake up the next morning with Herez, Narinisle, and Northcoast on our doorsteps demanding the same terms. Open that pipe, and it won’t close.”

Pyk nodded her approval, but Cithrin tilted her head. Something in the way he had said the words, and the words he had chosen, plucked at her. He didn’t meet her eyes. “When you say, We can’t, you mean the holding company.”

“I do.”

Pyk’s expression clouded and she sucked mightily at the gaps where her tusks had been. “You aren’t saying my branch ought to carry the burden.”

“I told her majesty’s master of coin that I was unfamiliar with the details of the branch, and would come to Porte Oliva and discuss what amounts might be available to contribute toward funding the defense of the realm.”

“Well,” Pyk said, “you can go right straight back up there and tell her majesty that defending the realm is her part of the bargain and paying the tax is mine. I’ve kept my end, now she can keep hers.”

“I think I might rephrase it,” Paerin said. “But I think first I will stall for as much time as we can manage. We’re in a bad position here.”

“Some foreign king has his cock in a twist,” Pyk said, waving her massive hand. “We haven’t even got a branch in his puffed-up empire. Let him stew. He won’t come here.”

“He will,” Cithrin said.

“The letters we’ve had from our nameless friend in Camnipol say the army is already on its way. It will be here before the middle of spring.”

“Army of stick men too damned tired to lift their own swords,” Pyk muttered. Isadau rose, stepped over to the Yemmu woman, and put a hand on her shoulder. Pyk sobbed once, and clamped her jaw. Cithrin had never seen the Yemmu woman frightened before. It shook her more than she’d imagined. She felt a sudden and unpleasant sense of protectivness toward her notary.

“We’ll stop them, then,” Cithrin said.

“That would be lovely,” Paerin said. “How do you propose to manage it?”

Cithrin took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. Geder was coming with swords, arrows, fire, and the spider priests. She had an accounting book and a strongbox of coins and jewelry. Perhaps she could hire a mercenary company. Or increase the bounties offered by the imaginary Callon Cane. Or…

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I will find a way.”

Paerin’s disappointment hissed out between his teeth. All four of them were quiet for a long moment. Carts rattled past in the street. A pigeon fluttered at the window and flew away. Cithrin folded her hands over her belly where the sick knot was tying itself tight in her gut.

“Work up a proposal,” Paerin said. “Send it to Carse when you have it. And we will see what we can do.”

“How long do I have?” Cithrin asked.

“I don’t know,” Paerin said. “It isn’t my deadline to set. Until Palliako’s forces come. Or until the queen decides to trade you for peace. You have all the time there is between right now and whenever it’s too late.”

He left that night, but Cithrin barely noticed. Her world narrowed to a single, overwhelming question: how to buy herself out of a war. She spent hours talking to Yardem Hane about the fine points of hiring mercenary companies: the distinction between guarding and a field contract, the structure of payments that was least likely to have the paid swords turn aside, the delays of travel and how to overcome them. She went through the bank’s books and ledgers going back as far as she could find, looking for any precedent that might apply. She reviewed the payments given out by Callon Cane, the estimates for fraud, the challenges of increasing the practice both in Herez and in other cities throughout the world.

Four days, she went without sleep. When Isadau came on the fifth day, Cithrin didn’t at first notice that the woman’s scales had an ashy dullness or that her movements were slow and careful. She didn’t see anything of Isadau’s sudden fragility until she spoke.

“I’m afraid we’re too late, dear. They’ve blockaded the harbor.”

Cithrin sat at her desk, blinking and confused. Which harbor? she thought. And then, Who blockaded it? How does that change the pricing? And then the sense of the words penetrated the armor of her focus, and she rose.

Viewed from the seawall, the Antean fleet looked like a busy day in port. Twenty ships ranging from the vast, canvas-strewn roundships to small, nimble-oared warships with bronze rams at their prows haunted the water just beyond the place where depth turned it a deeper blue. Fewer than half a dozen defending ships hunkered down in the bay. The harbor was too dangerous for the Antean fleet to traverse without a guide. The power and threat of the attackers was too great to permit any traffic to leave the port or enter it.

All along the seawall, men and women stood and gawked. A half dozen queensmen were shouting at one another as they assembled a ballista that hadn’t seen daylight in a generation. The sound of their voices in Cithrin’s tired ears was like the gabble of frightened chickens. Porte Oliva was under blockade. Antea had come by water, and no one would enter or leave the city that way. She knew that she should have been worrying about an army, a full siege, but all she could think was that the trade ships from Stollbourne would not come.

The implications spread out before her as clearly as and automatically as breath. The backers of the ships would all fail. Even if the cargo did manage to come in later, any loans used to finance them would have come due. If the goods landed at some other port and came overland, there would be tariffs and shipping, and bandits alerted to the possibility of wealth making its way down the dragon’s roads. All the insurance contracts would pay out, and anyone who had taken on too many would be crippled or driven out of the market…

“I’m damned,” Cithrin said. “Pyk was right about something.”