The Widow's House

Cithrin

Inys perched on the body of a felled tree that had been lifted between two great stone blocks. Claw marks left bright, pale lines where the bark had been stripped away, and a wide smear of blood on the pavement marked where a young bull had died that morning to satisfy the dragon’s hunger. Flies hovered and buzzed, drinking from the stain. Cithrin sat at a small writing desk, her pen in her hand, a length of parchment spread out before her already half covered with notes and comments. The clouds above them were white and rounded as cotton from the boll, and the heat of early summer thickened the air.

“When the enemy was killed,” Inys said, his voice low and somber, “the soldier fell, but the instruments of its blood would carry on the attack. A single tainted soldier would die, and its death could drive half a dozen others mad. My brother’s spiders could gain entry through the eyes, the mouth. Other ways. Any entry where the skin was thin enough to burrow down to blood. Even the scales of the Jasuru were no protection. They would climb under the scales themselves and dig down at their roots. The soldiers were then transformed, but their brothers and sisters who still loved them could often not bring themselves to kill the newly tainted. They seemed, after all, the men and women they had been before. They loved the same, spoke the same, thought the same. Were the same, truly, except they had been poisoned, and spread whatever false certainties they carried to all those around them. I recall one battle where Erex’s slaves utterly destroyed my brother’s little force, only to fall on each other in rage a month later.”

“And the Timzinae?”

“I fastened the scales into their skins. I built closures within them so finely wrought that their enemy’s blood could not touch theirs. I armed them with swords made to shrivel the spiders and poison the blood. Even above the Yemmu or Haunadam, they were the greatest warriors of the age. Not because they were stronger or better able to withstand violence, but because all other races were vulnerable, and they were not.”

Cithrin wrote it all down like a child before her tutor, her mind folding in every detail. She paused, tapping the butt of her pen against her teeth.

“But the way they can demoralize an army,” she said, “with speaking trumpets, for instance. The Timzinae are just as vulnerable to being convinced by their voices, aren’t they?”

“Yes, yes,” the dragon said, reaching out its foreclaw and pinching at the air as if demonstrating something. “You deafen them first. A little poke in each ear, and pack them with ashes. They heal enough to fight within a month, and the scars keep the spiders clear.”

“Couldn’t you just pour wax in there?” Cithrin asked.

The dragon shook its head. It was a weirdly familiar gesture seen on something so large. “Such plugs can fall out in the middle of a battle. Digging out the ears means there are no errors. It is a much better strategy.”

“But after the war, they’re still deafened for life.”

“After the war, they have served their purpose,” Inys said, unfolding his wings casually.

Cithrin wrote it down, but made a note of her own to look into reliable ways to stop up people’s ears. “Once they were deafened, how could someone command them in battle? A system of banners?”

“Ah, that was the genius of the Stormcrow. Commands were given by launching flames of differing color into the enemy lines. The generals remained at the rear of the force, loading their catapults with balls of resin with impurities that let them burn green or yellow or blue. When the sky above the battle changed color, the soldiers had their orders.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” she said, “but I’ll see what I can find.”

For the better part of the morning, Cithrin listened and recorded. Some days, Inys barely responded to her questions. Others, the dragon would go on for hours about some small point in the battle against his long-dead brother that Cithrin could see no applications for. And other times, times like today, he would outline some history that left her believing the war might be ended by winter.

She had known in general terms that she’d been ridden by anxiety and fear, but she hadn’t let herself actually feel it. She saw it in how poorly she slept, how angry she became with Pyk, how deeply she wept at the puppet shows she watched in the evenings. She felt she was still coming to know herself, the way she might learn about a new friend. But the coming of Marcus Wester and Inys with Master Kit and Cary and the players coupled with the unexpected lifting of the blockade left her drunk with relief. That more than anything else told her how frightened she had been before.

Near midday, Inys sighed once, spread his wings, and leaped into the sky without so much as a polite farewell. Cithrin watched until she was sure the dragon wasn’t coming back right away, then stood. The bowl of fish and rice she’d eaten at dawn had long since left her belly, and she was pleased that the dragon had taken flight. She made it a point not to be the one who ended their interviews. Too much depended on Inys remaining her ally to risk offending him.

A Firstblood man from her guards—Corisen Mout—came from under the shade of the cathedral’s eaves and lifted the little desk onto his back. Cithrin rolled the parchment into her fist and headed back first for the café and then the counting house and her room. All along the way, the street traffic slowed around her. Kurtadam, Timzinae, Firstblood, and Cinnae all nodded to her or glanced nervously away. Even those who pretended to ignore her were so pointed in their efforts that they might as well have stared. Between Barriath Kalliam’s small pirate fleet and the arrival of Inys, the city had gone almost overnight from seeing her as the goat that led home the wolves to the savior of the city. Even the governor, whose dictates carried the force of law, was second to Cithrin bel Sarcour, voice of the Medean bank. No more stones came through Maestro Asanpur’s window. No one scowled at her in the taprooms. She was fairly certain that no one had been spitting in her beer. Her mornings, she spent with the dragon. Her afternoons, with the bank.

In the café, Marcus Wester and Barriath Kalliam were sitting at a table in the back. Marcus was still thinned by his travels, his cheeks sunken and the skin of his forehead tight across the bone. He looked even older now than he had in Suddapal. Some of that was the burden of carrying the poisoned sword, but some was also time. And what he’d lost from picking up the sword, he might not get back when he put it down. The unease she felt with the thought was how she imagined it would be to have a father and realize he was growing old.

The day’s heat meant that even with the windows open, the air inside felt close. Most of Maestro Asanpur’s customers were sitting outside at the little tables with awnings above them for shade. By putting up with the warmth, Wester and Kalliam had the main room essentially to themselves. Only Asanpur also braved the heat.

“Coffee, Magistra?”

“And if you have any food,” Cithrin said.

The old Cinnae blinked his blind eye, grinned, and walked to the back as Cithrin sat at the head of the table. Wester nodded to her, but didn’t break the thread of his conversation.

“Even if we did, what would it show? He’s as likely to turn against us as them, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Barriath said. “Now that you put it that way.”

“Put what which way?” Cithrin asked.

“We’re discussing whether to introduce Lord Skestinin to Kit,” Marcus said. “Pull back the gambler’s mat and show him how the pea finds its way to the shell.”

“I served under Lord Skestinin for years,” Barriath said. “He’s a good man. Competent. Smart. He has no more reason to love the priests or Palliako than I do.”

“My point being that if we show him how Camnipol’s under the thumb of magic that bends minds and controls people by trotting out that we’ve got the same thing here, it’s not a guarantee that he’ll see us as precisely trustworthy and free. If he decides we’re all Master Kit’s puppets, we won’t be ahead of where we are now.”

“But your one can convince him,” Barriath said.

“And Geder’s can convince him right back,” Marcus said.

“There’s no reason to keep the truth from him,” Cithrin said. “But we can’t let him go.”

Barriath leaned forward, his fingertips pressing into the surface of the table. “If we could bring him to our side of this. Put him back on his ships, get him his sailors, aim him back toward Antea, it would undermine Palliako like nothing else.”

Maestro Asanpur stepped back into the room with a cup of coffee in one hand and a plate of cheese and dried apples in the other. He put them in front of Cithrin with a smile. The salt and cream of the cheese and the sweetness of the apples was better than a feast.

“Or he might be on our side from here to Northcoast and then change his mind and come sink every ship you’ve got,” Marcus said. The younger man scowled, but Marcus pressed on. “Unless we’re willing to send Kit to go on murmuring in the man’s ear every morning, we can’t be sure what he’ll do, and I don’t know about the two of you, but I’m not willing to use him that way.”

“If he would even agree to it,” Cithrin said and sipped her coffee. “He’s been reluctant to use his powers in the past.”

“Well,” Marcus said, “he’ll have to get over that when Palliako’s land forces arrive. If we get a dozen priests with speaking trumpets howling that we might as well give up, he’ll be needed behind the wall convincing us it’s not true.”

“Are we sure they’re coming here?” Barriath said. “The queen’s in Sara-sur-Mar.”

“This isn’t about the queen,” Cithrin said. “It’s about me.”

For a long moment, all three of them were silent. She could see that neither of them wanted to agree with her, but they couldn’t bring themselves to deny what they all knew was true. She popped another bit of dried apple into her mouth.

“I suppose we can ask Kit to do his cunning man’s show in the prison,” Marcus said. “Assuming the governor’s willing.”

“He will be if I ask him,” Cithrin said.

“Do you think he has a command from the queen to take you into custody yet?”

“I imagine he had it before either of you arrived,” Cithrin said. “Having and acting upon are two different things.”

Before she went back to the counting house, she stopped in her rented room in the rear of the café. In the time since Barriath and Inys had arrived, the back payments due to the bank had—mysteriously or perhaps not—started to come in a flood. Coin was flowing into her coffers, but not only from that. People had begun buying letters of exchange. The sea lanes were open now, and the tradesmen and wealthy classes of Porte Oliva knew that war was coming. Spice and tobacco, gold and jewelry had begun to make their way to Pyk’s table, and sealed and ciphered letters handed back across. They would be redeemed at some other branch of the bank—most likely Stollbourne or Carse—at a percentage of their original worth. It was a pattern Cithrin had seen before, a sign of fear and of the coming war. This time, it carried no anxiety for her. The knot in her belly was as lax as it had ever been. Not gone. Never gone. But at its ebb.

When she stepped into the counting house, Pyk and Magistra Isadau were laughing with each other. If the café had been warm, the counting house sweltered. Wide, dark parches of sweat marked Pyk’s armpits and the space under her breasts, but she didn’t seem put out. Isadau sat by the little window and waved her greeting to Cithrin as Yardem closed the door behind her.

“Back from your little squat at the Lizard Emperor’s feet?” Pyk asked, but her words didn’t have even their usual bite. “What wisdom for the ages did the great bastard lay out before you today?”

“He suggested we poke out all our soldiers’ ears before they go on the field,” Cithrin said. “Keep them from losing their fighting spirit.”

“That seems a bit extreme,” Isadau said. Her voice was light, but Cithrin could still hear the strain in it. She wished she could share her relief and calm with Isadau. But perhaps with time it would come.

“Any price is cheap when you don’t value the coin,” Pyk said. “That dragon’s impressive, and no doubt. But the way I see it, he’d trade us all for another of his own kind. But give him this. He’s good for business.”

Cithrin leaned against the wall and lifted her brows. Isadau’s grin brought out one of her own. “More people, then?”

Pyk waved her hands at the table. “Suddenly half the city’s falling all over itself to place deposits with us. Everyone that’s leaving wants letters of exchange. Everyone who’s staying wants to buy their way into our good graces.”

“Are we too heavy with coin?”

“Hell yes,” Pyk said. “And we’ll stay that way until this gets resolved. I’m not making any loans to people outside the city wall, and that’s half the businesses there are. Once Palliako’s army’s shown up and been driven off, we can see who needs help rebuilding. Buys us goodwill from the locals, and opens up the chance to get into some solid partnerships.”

“And the queen?”

Pyk shrugged. “Noble blood’s always disappointed when we tell them to screw off. Can’t see this will be any different. Since it’s you and your pet lizard driving Antea back to its huts, I can’t see that she’ll have much room to complain, though. And if there’s a way to stay on Inys’s good side once the war’s done, well, even better.”

Once the war’s done. There was a phrase. So much of her life had been tied to Antea and to violence even before the cult of the spider goddess had come that the thought of after seemed like a thing from a children’s rhyme. Once, a terrible war ripped the land. Once, children were thrown into prisons to be killed if their parents tried to throw off the slavers’ yoke. Once, innocent people burned with their cities because men with power decided that they should. Once, but not now.

She could barely imagine what that world would be like. She wanted to believe that all the refugees of Suddapal would go back to their homes. All the enslaved Timzinae would leave the Antean farms that had become their prisons. All the children would find their mothers and fathers again, and everything would be made right and whole. But, of course, it wouldn’t. Once the war’s done could only ever be about what came next. Hoping to go back to what the world had been was trying to build wood from ashes.

“Look at her, Isadau,” Pyk said and spat between her teeth. “I ask her to do one damned thing for the bank, and she starts pouting.”

“I wasn’t pouting,” Cithrin snapped. “I was thinking. Of course I’ll cultivate Inys if I can. When this is all over.”

“Pyk didn’t mean it, dear,” Isadau said. “Barking is her way of showing love.”

“The fuck it is,” Pyk said with a laugh.

“And we all love you too,” Isadau said, and Pyk laughed louder.

Cithrin stepped over to Pyk’s table, looking at the numbers her notary was working. They were good. The branch was healthy. Less risk, and more money. Everything Pyk had called success. She found herself thinking about what of her plans the influx of gold could have supported. With what she had now, she could have hired a solid mercenary company. Or built a new bounty exchange in Borja. Or bought out the iron ore from the mines in Hallskar to see that it never reached the forges of Antea. Anything. But not all of it. She wondered, if she’d tried, if she could have won it all on her own. Her bank against Geder’s empire. Would she have been enough? Or would that have been a very different once the war’s done?

When she looked up, Isadau caught her gaze. The older Timzinae woman smiled, but there was a hardness to it, and always would be. Cithrin felt a little tug of shame. She was not going to let herself be sorry that she’d won the battle one way and not another. None of this was about whether she was clever enough. It wasn’t about her. Or Geder. This was the war of the dragons resurrected, and nothing more. Or if not nothing, only a little.

“Rumor is the queen’s forces had their fingers handed back to them at the pass from Bellin,” Pyk said.

“I’d heard that too,” Cithrin said. “I expect the Antean army is marching south as we speak.”

“Will we be ready when they come?” Isadau asked.

“We’re ready now,” Cithrin said. “We have a dragon.”