The Widow's House

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

The sea had never been home for Cithrin bel Sarcour. Her life had been grown around the Medean bank as a vine around a trellis, and so the great waters of the world had been one part roadway that linked all ports and one part supplier of fish and salt and oil. Vaster than the lands on her maps, the sea had been defined by where it connected and what could be taken from it. That it was also a place had never entered her mind before now.

The winter days spent on the Inner Sea were brief, bright, and cold. The nights were black. Ice coated the decks and frost formed on the rigging by moonlight, melting only reluctantly with the coming of dawn. The shore was a darkness on the northern horizon, and Cithrin looked at it from the rails wishing she might never touch land again. Behind her little ship was the wreckage of the five cities of occupied Suddapal. Before her, Porte Oliva. One, a city that had fallen to the murderous ambitions of Antea. The other, her home. And somewhere beyond the black line to the north was Geder Palliako, regent of Antea and leader of the spider priests, whom—for the best of reasons—she had embarrassed and betrayed. Every hour brought her closer to the docks of Porte Oliva and the necessity of facing the consequences of her choice. She would rather have stayed at sea.

Instead, she spent her days walking the decks and her nights in her tiny cabin, a plank across her thighs, writing and rewriting her report to the bank. She had left Suddapal with no warning, and was traveling so quickly that no courier would outpace her. The news of her decision to abandon the city and their efforts there would arrive with her. The ledgers and books in the chest under her hammock would tell the whole tale, but her report was her chance to interpret it, to shape for the others what she had been thinking and why she had done what she’d done. Every night she tried, and every morning scraped the ink from the parchment and began again until the morning came with no more nights behind it.

Yardem Hane, the head of her guard company now that Marcus Wester was gone, stood on the deck at her side. His great ears were cocked forward, as if he were listening to the waves. She pulled her black wool cloak tight around her shoulders and let the wind bite at her face. The smoke from Porte Oliva’s chimneys rose in the north, white against the winter blue.

“Well,” she said, “this will be interesting.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Yardem said, his voice low and rolling as a landslide. “Afraid it will.”

The call of seagulls grew slowly louder as the captain angled the ship in toward shore. “I did what needed to be done.”

“Did.”

“You’d think that would be comforting.”

He turned his wide, canine head to her. “Regrets, ma’am?”

“Ask me again when I’ve made my report.”

The seawall of Porte Oliva rose up high above the surf. As the guide boat led them in through the maze of reefs that made up the bay, Cithrin considered the stone. At the top, narrow openings showed where engines of war could be placed should the city come under siege. She had walked by them a thousand times, and only seen them as a curiosity of the architecture. The world had changed.

Once they reached the docks, she paid the captain his fees and greeted the harbormaster’s assistant. The docking taxes were a simple formality, quickly assessed and quickly paid. Yardem and Enen saw to the unloading of the cargo: crates and chests, and the last few Timzinae citizens whom Cithrin had been able to bring with her. Most were children, some barely old enough to walk, sent to a city where they might know no one rather than remain in their homes and be used to force the compliance of their parents. Those who had no one to meet, Yardem rounded up, instructing them to hold each other’s hands, to watch for each other, and be sure no one was lost. The sight left Cithrin on the edge of tears.

“To the counting house, Magistra?” Enen asked.

“Not yet,” Cithrin said. “You go ahead of me. I think I’ll spend a moment with the city first.”

“Would you like me to deliver your report to Pyk?”

“Yes, if you’d be so kind,” Cithrin said. “It’s in the chest with the books and ledgers there. If Magistra Isadau is there…”

Enen smiled, compassion softening her grey-pelted face. Odd to think there was a time Cithrin had found the Kurtadam woman’s expressions difficult to read.

“I’ll tell her you’re looking forward to seeing her, ma’am,” the old guard said, nodding her head.

Cithrin had come to Porte Oliva as a refugee too young to own property or sign contracts. She had relied for her survival on the protection of men of violence like Yardem Hane and Marcus Wester, the counsel of professional deceivers like Master Kit and Cary and poor, dead Opal, and the training she had in matters of finance that taken the place of love in her childhood. Then, she had needed training to know how to walk as woman walked, and not a girl. Since, she had seen a slaughtered priest hung before his church, had lived in hiding while an insurrection wracked the city around her, had prepared to debase herself in the name of saving others and found that she could not. She no longer needed to remind herself to hold her weight low in her hips or to pull her shoulders back. She walked through the familiar streets of Porte Oliva as if she were older than her years because it was true now. She had become the woman she’d only pretended to be, and the weight of it was more than she’d anticipated.

Porte Oliva had always been a place where the thirteen races of humanity mixed. Otter-pelted Kurtadam with the ornamental beads worked into their fur. Thin, pale Cinnae moving through the streets like ghosts. Bronze-scaled Jasuru, thick-featured Firstblood. There were even a handful of Tralgu and Yemmu, though Cithrin had rarely seen them apart from Yardem and Pyk Usterhall. And the Drowned swam in lazy pods through the water of the bay. She had spent so much time and effort sneaking Timzinae away from Suddapal that she’d expected to see the mixture on the streets of Porte Oliva changed. It was not. There were some Timzinae as there always had been, but she could not say it was more, and after almost a year in Elassae, they seemed too few.

At the southern edge of the Grand Market, she stopped for a while, bought a cup of honeyed almonds from a street cart, and watched one of the puppet shows that made up the civic dialogue. It was a retelling of the classic story of the rise of Orcus the Demon King, with the plot and dialogue changed. The Orcus puppet was in the shape of a Firstblood man in a flowing black cloak, and when the puppeteer spoke his words, they had the accent of Imperial Antea. Geder Palliako’s reputation had spread even to here, then, and Cithrin was not the only one who looked on his victories with dread. The war that the wise had said would never spread so far or last so long had swamped her. The soldiers and the priests had not come here—not yet—but the fear of them had. She wasn’t sure if that left her saddened or pleased. Either way, it was good that they knew.

She left before the end of the show, dropping a silver coin in the box at the puppeteer’s feet, and passed through the Grand Market. The riot of stalls and sellers shouting each other down washed around her, and she felt herself relax a degree for the first time since she’d stepped off the ship. At one stall, a man was selling expensive dresses with the weeping colors of Hallskari salt dye, and she smiled at them.

Banking and commerce were a dance of information and deception, lies and facts and all the power that gold could provide, and she knew it better than she knew herself. She had seen it in the houses of Suddapal, the courts of Camnipol, the theater cart of Master Kit’s traveling company. The Grand Market of Porte Oliva was the expression of it that was most her own. If she chose, she could see it as an innocent might. Men and women jostling one another, merchants in their stalls calling or haggling or adjusting their wares. The queensmen in green and gold strolling through the chaos with bored expressions. Cithrin could see all of that, but she could also see more. The way the price of a bottle of wine in one stall rose when the competitor across the market was too busy to call out a lower one. The way that a bag of coffee was priced ridiculously high so that the bag beside it could be merely exorbitant and still seem a bargain. She could track cutpurses and unlicensed fortune tellers moving in response to the queensmen, finding the balance between turning a profit and ending in a cage outside the Governor’s Palace, measuring their chances in feet from the law, in the degrees by which their faces and shoulders were turned away. Cithrin could look at the placement of the stalls, drawn by random lot at the beginning of each day, and see who had bribed the queensmen who controlled the lottery box. The state of the city was written in the chaos like an expression on a well-known face.

She stepped out the main entrance to the market and into the square beyond it feeling calmer. But only a little bit. The distraction was pleasant, but it did nothing to change the facts of her situation. That accounting would come soon enough. She nodded to the head of the guard as she passed, and he nodded back.

“Good to see you again, Magistra,” he said. “Didn’t know you’d come back.”

“I’ve only just arrived,” she said.

“City’s not been the same without you.”

“Flatterer,” Cithrin said and walked on.

So far as anyone knew, she was and had always been the authorized voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. That she had been underaged when she founded the bank, that the documents of foundation were forgeries, that her notary, the de-tusked Yemmu woman called Pyk Usterhall, was the true authorized power of the branch were all secrets. Another example of the banker’s trade of seeming one thing and being another.

She pushed through the front doors of the café and shrugged off her cloak. The smell of the fresh coffee and cinnamon, bread and black vinegar were like coming home.

“Magistra!” the ancient Cinnae man said, his straw-thin, straw-pale fingers splayed in the air, his grin warm.

“Maestro Asanpur,” she said, accepting his embrace. “I’m so glad to see you again.”

“Come, sit. I will bring you your usual, eh?”

The café had been her idea. Maestro Asanpur was a Cinnae, as her own mother had been. The ancient man with the one milky eye and the touch for coffee that bordered on a cunning man’s art had been happy enough to rent her the use of a back room. The café had become her unofficial office. The center of a bank that held its business in the centers of power all across the world. Or that had, when the world had been a better place. Before Vanai burned. Before Suddapal fell. Maestro Ansanpur put the bone-colored cup in front of her. The coffee was sweeter than it had been in Suddapal, more gentle. Softened with milk and left simple compared with the complex spices the Timzinae used in the country that had been their home. Sipping it was like being two different people—the woman who during her months of exile had longed for the familiar comforts, and also the traveler to whom this particular comfort was no longer familiar. Asanpur stood at her side, his hands fluttering restlessly at his hip, his face open and bright, waiting for her approval.

Cithrin closed her eyes in pleasure that was only half feigned. “It’s good to be home.”

The old man beamed with pleasure and went back to his kitchens. Cithrin sat quietly, waiting for her body to stop telling her that the ground beneath her was shifting with the waves. The moment only felt like peace, but the illusion was all she had, and so she cultivated it.

She had almost a full, pleasant hour before Pyk lumbered through the door. Cithrin had never asked how she had lost the great tusks that rose from most Yemmu’s lower jaws, but without them, Pyk might almost have passed for a thick, brutish Firstblood. She strode up to Cithrin’s side, her eyebrow hoisted.

“Magistra,” Pyk said, making the word a mild insult. “Thank you so much for agreeing to meet me here.”

She meant, of course, that Cithrin should have come to the counting house and delivered the report herself rather than sending it with Enen. Cithrin smiled.

“Where better?” she asked.

“Shall we?” Pyk asked, gesturing toward the door of the private room. Cithrin’s belly went tight. This was the moment she had dreaded. One of them, at least. There would be others, and soon. She rose, her coffee warm in her hand. When she’d sat at the table, Pyk closed the door behind them.

“Well,” the Yemmu woman said. “You’ve got balls. Not the sense that God gave a housefly, but balls.”

Cithrin permitted herself a thin smile. It was a mistake.

“If I were you,” Pyk went on, lowering herself onto the bench, “I would have changed my name, headed out to Far Syramys, and never been heard from again. A favor to the rest of us, if nothing else.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Before I send off my recommendations, I want to make sure I’ve understood this. After Isadau left Suddapal, you used your old love affair with the regent of Antea as cover to build an illegal network that helped Timzinae refugees escape the city.”

“No,” Cithrin said. “I started before Isadau left.”

“Thank you for clarifying that. And then when Palliako—who is, by the way, the most powerful man in the fucking world—started writing you love notes and offering to see you, you left him flat and came back to roost in my city.”

“I’d intended to stay,” Cithrin said. “I meant to carry on the masquerade as long as I could.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Cithrin was quiet for a moment, then nodded to herself.

“I did. I stayed as long as I could. And then, when I couldn’t, I left.”

“Well, at least you’ve got standards.”

“The bank supported everything we were doing there,” Cithrin said. “Isadau first and then me. Komme knew about the refugees’ network. He created Callon Cane and the bounty system, or allowed it to be created. I stayed there because if I hadn’t, Isadau would have stayed, and she would have been killed, and she wasn’t. I saved hundreds of people from the Antean prisons, and most of them were children. Say what you like about me, we won.”

Pyk folded her fingers together on the table. Her expression was worse than angry. It was patient.

“We’re a bank. When we’ve won, we have less risk and more money. You’ve brought less money and more risk. You made the classic error. You saw something you wanted, and you bought it. For you it was Timzinae lives. For someone else it could have been fancy jewelry. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same mistake.”

“It isn’t,” Cithrin said.

“It is,” Pyk said, and her tone allowed no room for dissent. “Our job is to get power. Gather it up. Protect it. Not piss it away so that we can claim the moral high ground.”

“We disagree about that,” Cithrin said, but in truth she wasn’t certain that they did. She could imagine her first teacher, Magister Imaniel, saying all the same words that Pyk did, and they held the weight of truth.

“Komme and Isadau and Paerin and I,” Pyk said. “All of us were careful. We invented this Callon Cane for the bounties. We hid the payments so that no one would track them back to us. We saw to it that the contracts with the ships never listed our extra passengers. And you? You rubbed the Lord Regent’s nose in shit and signed it with the company chop. You declared war on Antea in my name and in Komme’s. And Paerin’s and Chana’s and Lauro’s. If Isadau had stayed, she’d have been killed when they found her out, but we could have claimed she was acting on her own. But you? You brought it here. You brought it to me. The latest of my Cithrin bel Sarcour messes to mop up after.”

She snorted with a grandiose disgust. Cithrin’s jaw tightened and her heart raced like she was being attacked. She forced herself not to move, afraid any motion might end with her fleeing the room.

“The conditions are the same as before,” Pyk went on. “You’re the voice of the bank in name, but you’ve got no power. Even if you hadn’t lit us all on fire, you’d still be my apprentice for a full year, so that’s how it is. You agree to nothing unless I say to. You sign nothing at all, ever. Wear your fancy dresses, go to all the best dinners, be pretty for the governor, but try to take one bit of real power from me, and I’ll put you in a hole. I’ll forward your report and my recommendations to Carse, and we’ll see what Komme wants done with you.”

“What will your recommendation be?”

“That we wrap you in chains and festive paper and ship you to Camnipol with a letter of apology,” Pyk said. “But that’s his to decide, not mine.”

She had known. Some part of her had known the moment she lost sight of Suddapal that it could be no different than this. It didn’t pull the sting, or if it did, not enough.

“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said softly. “I did what I had do.”

“You did not,” Pyk said. “You didn’t have to. God didn’t come up from the earth and demand it. No one held a sword to you. So don’t tell me you had to.”

Cithrin looked into the coffee, the brown swirl at the bottom. The cup had tiny pores all along the inside, and the drink clung to the texture like a man’s cheek a day after he’d shaved. She thought for a moment of Marcus Wester.

“You’re right,” she said. “I didn’t have to. This was what I chose.”

“And?”

Cithrin looked up. “And I’m not sorry.”