“It’s another debt that can never be repaid. That’s…” Marcus’s head snapped up to look at her, but she only shook her head. It was there, at the edge of her understanding, but she was spread too thin to grasp it now. It would come if she gave it time. If she had enough time to give it.
She walked through the house only half seeing it. Tapestries hung along the walls, telling the tale of House Palliako or else merely showing the skill of the weavers. A few servants scuttled along before her, staying out of her way as they’d been told to do. War was a debt paid with a debt that left both sides poorer. It was always that, and never anything else no matter what the songs and stories claimed. That was what Morade had seen and embraced. The mad dragon emperor had tried to drown the world in an acid that would eat away everything. But he’d failed once.
The dining hall was smaller than Maestro Asanpur’s café had been. Two long wooden tables stood at an angle to each other, platters of eggs and beans, bread and jam standing ready to be eaten. At the smell, Cithrin’s stomach lurched awake, and a vast appetite filled her. At the end of one table, the farthest from her, Lehrer Palliako and Geder sat across from each other, talking and gesturing and laughing. A father and a son, taking pleasure in each other’s company. Seeing them was like looking down a cliff; it left her a little dizzy. Or maybe that was only hunger and lack of sleep.
“Magistra!” Lehrer said, rising to his feet. “Please, come sit with us. There’s enough room, God knows. Isn’t there enough room, my boy?”
Geder nodded, but his eyes were on his feet and a wild blush was pushing up his neck and out to his cheeks. When his gaze did flicker up to meet hers, he tried a smile. She returned it, and the artifice was easier than she’d expected. And then she remembered how many lives had been spent by his misplaced affection and she looked away. Marcus shifted behind her.
“Thank you, my lord,” Cithrin said, “but the captain and I have business we should see to. I’ve only come for a moment.”
“Well, eat. Eat before you go,” Lehrer said, gesturing toward the expanse of food. “This is all for you and your people, after all.”
Cithrin took a plate of sausages in her hand. The first one popped between her teeth, flooding her mouth with grease and salt and the sweetness of roasted garlic. “You’re too generous,” she said.
“Not generous enough,” Lehrer said.
Clara
I am reconciling myself to the idea that I will never see my husband again,” Lady Skestinin said.
“Oh you mustn’t say that,” Delliah Kemmin said around a mouthful of sweet bun.
The garden party was at Lord Emming’s estate. A pavilion of colored canvas decorated with banners of colored silk had been raised over a wide paved square at the garden’s center. A trio of Dartinae slaves wearing glittering robes that matched their glowing eyes stood on a dais not far away from Clara’s table, their voices mixed in a careful harmony. They kept the song quiet enough not to interfere with conversation. The air was thick with the scents of turned earth and flowers and freshly brewed tea. The overall effect was to leave Clara shifting with a barely contained impatience.
“It has been too long without word,” Lady Skestinin said. “He was lost in Porte Oliva before the city fell. And I’ve been seeing a cunning man on it.”
“No,” Rielle Castannan said. “Which one?”
“The Jasuru woman that Lady Caot recommended,” Lady Skestinin said. “She’s been lighting fires for me and reading the flames. She’s seen his body in them, she said. Killed and buried under the plains of Birancour.” Her voice broke at the last. Clara put down her teacup too abruptly. It rattled.
“Before you give up all hope,” she said, “I would recommend being sure your cunning man is what she claims to be.”
Lady Skestinin’s lips tightened and her shoulders slid back a degree. “I’m not certain what you mean, Lady Kalliam.”
“Ask her something you have the answer to,” Clara said. “See whether she can learn what you do know before you put too much trust in her ability to know what you don’t.”
Because, while the plains of Birancour was a pretty phrase and rich with connotations of lost love and exotic locations, she’d been there. There were any number of Antean dead in that ground, but Lord Skestinin was in a decent if uncomfortable cell in Carse. Not that she could say that. It was only that watching another woman’s grief be exploited upset her, even if it was Lady Skestinin’s.
“Or take one of the priests,” Lady Kemmin said.
“Or that,” Clara agreed, sourly.
A dozen women or more had arranged themselves around the garden, each according to their own dignity and position. Depending upon who spoke to whom and where the apparently casual traffic of social exchange went, their status would be ratified by the women around them or else denied. Clara watched it with a practiced eye for the occult significance of it all: Lady Emming had taken the chair with its back to the house, and so commanded the best view of the gardens; Canl Daskellin’s youngest daughter had arrived slightly before her older sister; the ladies whose houses extended to Asterilhold weren’t deferring to the purely Antean houses the way they had been when Clara had left to follow Jorey. All of it had meaning.
Including—especially—Nickayla Essian’s dress.
It was simply cut, and flattered her figure. The cloth was a gentle green set off by more vibrant ribbons at the spine and woven into the skirt. During King Simeon’s reign, it would have been an acceptable if unremarkable choice. Among the black leather jackets and unsettling ossuary cloaks of the present fashion, she stood out like a single live blossom on a burned field. The context made it bold, even brash. And more, it announced an allegiance to Clara. The borrowed green dress she’d worn to Lady Emming’s previous, smaller garden party had begun a new fashion. Nickayla Essian’s statement was the boldest, but once Clara knew to look, there were others. Dannie Sennian had a pale-green ribbon woven in her braids. Lauria Caot, while still sporting a fringe of bones along the cuffs of her sleeves, had a choker with a single new leaf as its pendant.
None of them knew or could know the depth of the conspiracy in which she’d involved herself. She felt tired because she’d spent a fair portion of the previous night with the Lord Regent and the banker who was his mortal enemy and unhealthy obsession. Most of them would have been horrified to find out that she had camped at the edges of Jorey’s army with the whores and merchant carters, much less that she’d helped to engineer a fundamental realignment in the forces of the war. For them, the struggle was still very much the Severed Throne and the spider goddess standing against the draconic and inhuman Timzinae. But Nickayla had seen something in the accident of Clara’s appearance, and she’d grabbed on to it.
It wasn’t hope, but it might be the desire that there be hope. A shoot of new growth in the decadence of black jackets and bone robes. That the potential existed at all meant something, and Clara suspected it would be something good. Unless the two armies in the field against Jorey did their work and everyone here faced the blades and arrows of Elassae.
It seemed impossible that Camnipol could fall. Even with the men of court scattered for the most part to the army, everything was too familiar, too regular. Catastrophe would surely announce itself more clearly. Simply by having garden parties and dances, feasts and performances of poetry, they affirmed the normalcy of the world. Surely if the end were really coming, they wouldn’t have sweet buns and tea, and so sweet buns and tea were a kind of armor against what they all feared. The laughter that covered the shriek.
She imagined Suddapal had felt much the same before their own army had come to it.
Her mind turned to Hoban, the cunning man who’d saved Vincen Coe’s life once. She wondered whether he still worked out of the little house in the low quarter of the city. Alston, who had been her servant when she’d been Baroness of Osterling Fells and kept a compound of her own, and was now… she didn’t know. She’d been so careful to keep track of a
ll her old servants. Now that she’d come back from her tour with the army, she needed to find them all again. Tomorrow. She would do that tomorrow, unless the enemy came. Unless Geder decided to execute them all as traitors. Unless Lady Skestinin discovered that Clara had… how had Lord Skestinin put it? Betrayed the kingdom? Well, if the world didn’t find some way to collapse before the next morning, she would put in the effort to find her old servants and go to the Prisoners’ Span and renew her old acquaintances there.
Oddly, the idea cheered her. It would be good to see them all. And, now that she thought of it, there might be other connections within the court that it would be wise to renew. The problem of the Timzinae children in the prison and their parents working as slaves on the farms, for instance, might be something that—
“Don’t you think, Clara?” Rielle Castannan said, and Clara realized she’d utterly lost the thread of the conversation.
“I am making a concerted effort not to think at all,” she said, and the others chuckled politely.
The commotion in the house was small at first: a raised voice, and movement in the doorway. Clara hardly noticed it. It was only when the others began to rise from their seats that she turned back to look. Geder Palliako stood on the stone-paved walk with a too-cheerful smile and cast his gaze across the gardens. Lord Emming trotted out from the house, his shirt and hair in disarray. He looked like a man half wakened from a nap, which he likely was. Clara stood, either in respect for the Lord Regent or through the animal impulse to run. Discerning between the two was not straightforward. If Cithrin bel Sarcour had failed, this would be Clara’s last moment as a free woman. She tried to savor it.
Her mouth set in a tight smile, Lady Emming came to where the two men were speaking. Neither priests nor guards accompanied the Lord Regent, so that was something. Clara chanced a look around the garden. Not all the guests were standing, but most were. Not all looked frightened, but more than didn’t. So at least she wouldn’t stand out.
Lady Emming nodded to the Lord Regent and gestured toward Clara’s table. Geder’s gaze shifted to her and grew brighter. He trotted toward her, waving to the other women as he came, like the parody of a carefree man. “Please don’t let me interrupt,” he said as he reached her. “I only need to borrow Lady Kalliam for a moment. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” Lady Skestinin said, but too late. Geder had taken Clara’s arm in his and was already leading her off to a corner of the garden where rosebushes formed a little grotto of thorns and buds not yet in bloom. Geder looked back at the party, playing his grin over the ladies of the court like a searchlight in the darkness. When he spoke to her, his voice was low and conspiratorial.
“We’re meeting tomorrow night,” he said. “The Ebbingbaugh compound, just before sundown. Can you be there?”
“Of course I can,” she said.
“Good, good, good. I’m putting a plan together, and I want you all to be part of it. You’re the only people I can trust anymore.”
I have betrayed you as deeply as I could manage, Clara thought. I stood by and watched you slaughter a man I love with your own hand. And yes, I see that you trust me. Her heart was complicated by pity and hatred and a hope of her own.
“I will make my way there,” she said. “Discreetly.”
“Yes. Important that we be discreet,” he said, with the eyes of the garden party on him. He appeared unaware of the irony. “There are going to be a lot of things we need to manage if we’re going to fix all this. A lot of things to be done.”
“That’s true.”
“And I wanted… I wanted to thank you. For what you’ve done. For bringing her back to me.” He nodded, his gaze on the roses, as if by nodding he could convince her to agree that Cithrin bel Sarcour had been brought back as a gift for him.
“If I helped the throne, I’m pleased,” Clara said.
When he looked up at her, his eyes were as bright as a fever. “I’m going to show her it wasn’t me. She’ll understand. Better than anyone. Don’t you think?”
“I think we’ll all need to be careful,” she said, not answering the question, though he acted as if she had.
When she returned to her tea, Geder made a show of shaking Lord Emming’s hand and escorting him back into the house as though it had been him the Lord Regent had come for and meeting Clara had been only a happy accident. It was overacting of such scale that it would, she expected, be inscrutable to the court. They would see the change, though. The Lord Regent had returned to public life. His energy and optimism of form would mean something to those seeing it. What exactly they would think, she couldn’t guess.
“Preparations for Jorey’s triumph?” Lady Skestinin asked. An undertone of jealousy sharpened the words.
“Something like that,” Clara said mildly.
Not all men of the court had left Camnipol, but those who remained fell into distinct categories: the old and infirm, like Jaram Terrinnian, Earl of Attenmarch, who had outlived three kings in his time and hardly ever left his gardens; the very young, like Daunan Broot, toddling now after his mother and unlikely to see his father in this world; the highest leaders of the empire, like Geder and Aster and the bull-huge Basrahip; and the disgraced. It was to this last category that Clara turned her attention.
Curtin Issandrian’s home shared the street with the one Geder had claimed from Feldin Maas. From its gate Clara could see the vast and unruly hedge where she’d hidden once from her cousin’s husband’s guards. Where a wounded huntsman had stolen a kiss, long before her own husband had died. She supposed that with so many lives packed so close together, all the city must be like this. The architecture and streets recurring in people’s lives, meaning something a bit new every time, but echoing all that had come before. Or perhaps that wasn’t the city. Perhaps that was the whole world.
The courtyard outside Curtin Issandrian’s house had fallen into disrepair. The cobbles themselves showed holes where the cold had shattered stones that had not been replaced. The hedges had the yellowed look of distressed plants, and the flowers within showed more stem than blossom. The door slave was a Kurtadam man with a greying pelt and a limp, who seemed astonished that anyone would come to the house. Company at Issandrian’s compound was clearly an exceptional thing.
The years had been kinder to the man himself than she would have expected. His once long hair remained short-cropped as she had seen it last, but he also sported a thick mustache and beard that suited him better than she would have guessed. His whiskers, like his gardens, were in need of some trimming, but the potential was there.
“Lady Kalliam,” he said, walking with her into his withdrawing room. “It’s been too long. I hadn’t expected to see you again.”
When she’d been there last, it had been to filch letters from his study. She recalled it now with a combination of shame that she’d taken advantage of the man’s good nature and pride that she’d gotten away with it. She sat on the divan now and he sat across from her, his legs crossed.
“I’m afraid events have conspired to keep me away from court more than I might have liked,” she said.
“I can’t say you’ve missed much of consequence,” Issandrian said. “Or at least, if you have, I’ve missed it as well. I made an unfortunate friend in Alan Klin once, and I’m paying for it still. The Lord Regent isn’t a man who easily forgets a grudge.”
The Lord Regent, she thought, is a man who will easily forget whatever it pleases him to forget and recall what he wishes to recall. It’s what makes him most like the rest of us.
“Well, the wheel of the world hasn’t stopped turning yet,” Clara said. “There may be changes of fortune ahead still.”
“I don’t see much hope of it,” Issandrian said.
“I do, but I stand upon a slightly different stair.”
A Cinnae man in a servant’s livery knocked at the door, bowed his way in with a carafe of steaming coffee, served it, and bowed his way out. Clara took her pipe from her sleeve and packed i
t with fresh leaf.
“I wondered,” she said, “whether you might still have friends among the farmers?”
“Some, yes,” Issandrian said, and sipped at his cup.
“Have you a sense of whether there is a common opinion on the Timzinae slaves?”
“They’re a godsend,” Issandrian said, without hesitating. “There’s not a farm in the southern empire that hasn’t lost at least one son to the army. Near Sevenpol there are farms running that have lost four or five to it. Without the slaves, we’d be eating clouds and drinking raindrops.”
“I see,” Clara said, drawing on her pipe. The smoke tasted rich, and the coffee better. Issandrian’s gaze was a question. She let the smoke seep out through her teeth while she considered what she wanted to ask, and how she wanted to ask it. “Between the two of us, and purely as speculation—yes?—purely as speculation, what do you imagine your friends among that stratum would think of setting the Timzinae free?”
Issandrian laughed, but it was from shock, not condescension. That was good. “I can’t think why they would.”
“Say as speculation it was required to make peace.”
“Peace? Peace with who?”
“Elassae. Sarakal. Everyone.”
Issandrian put down his cup. His skin, already pale, had gone a shade paler. She gave him the moment, drinking her own coffee. It wasn’t quite pure, she thought, but she couldn’t identify what the extender was that he’d used. Something about the kind of bitterness it carried made her suspect it was a root of some sort. Issandrian folded his hands on his knees.
“I thought we were winning,” Issandrian said. “Everyone says that we’re winning.”
“We’re not.”
Issandrian pressed a hand to his chin. His distress would have been comic if it hadn’t been so sincere. “I can talk with them about raising more troops. I don’t know that there’s many to be had, but if it’s that or lose the war—”
“The war cannot be won. Only prolonged,” Clara said. “It may come to a place where prolonging it is worth the effort and blood, but that isn’t what I need to know of you now. I believe there is a change coming upon us rather quickly. If I’m right, it may give us a chance to save something of the empire, but we would need to be ready to act.”