They had been constrained by the gold in their coffers then. Now that the gates of possibility had opened, Cithrin’s time was spent less generating plans than with putting them in action. Bounty boards were fast and easy. A single local agent in an occupied city could inspire any number of actions against the enemy simply by setting a price on them. Or, if the enemy forces within cities like Nus and Inentai and Suddapal proved too dangerous, some nearby hamlet in Borja or the Keshet could be converted to a base.
Hiring mercenaries was slower than that, but in the long term more effective. The paid blades were for the most part between contracts for the winter. Those who were not subjects of Northcoast or Herez or Narinisle might demand coin rather than the letters of transfer, but Cithrin was confident that she could buy hard coin with credit if she found the right discount rate. It wasn’t as though the gold of Northcoast was needed in the kingdom any longer. Not if she had her way about it. Fixing prices on ore and inedible crops, while ultimately more powerful, took a greater time to see results. She found herself wishing that victory against the enemy might be a matter of years, just so she could see all her schemes enacted.
She sat in her workroom in the holding company’s compound, the dim, fitful light of winter that came through the window adding blue to the buttery yellow light of her candles. Her ledgers piled the desk, and maps lay unrolled and tacked to the walls. A bottle of wine still half-full stood forgotten beside a plate of cheese and hard sausage. In her small space, the world opened like a blossom in springtime, visible only to her. And to people who had the trick of seeing the world as she saw it.
From Inentai, reports said the empire’s strength was faltering. At Kiaria, the mountain stronghold of the Timzinae race, the armies of Antea had met defeat even with the power of the spider priests. Like a child who had never learned restraint, Geder Palliako had spread his might so wide that it had grown thin and brittle. The war was the widest and swiftest anyone had ever seen, and the price it had demanded was terrible. The cities it had taken from her—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—still ached like a lost limb. The Timzinae taken into slavery, their children imprisoned as surety of their good behavior, suffered and died on the farms of the Antean Empire even as she sat, warm and safe in Carse.
To sow chaos among the enemy now, with enemy forces spread so wide and schisms beginning to form among the priesthood of the spider goddess, was less than blowing aside a feather. The map of the war was a portrait of overreach.
In any other conflict, it would have given her hope.
There had been a time, not even very long ago, when winning a war had meant crushing an enemy, killing them, lighting their cities afire. She, like the others around her, had imagined redeeming the world with the point of a dagger. It was, after all, the story everyone told of how a war ended: a righteous victor, a conquered evil, order restored. It was a lie in every particular. Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And the spiders that tainted the priests’ blood were a tool designed by a brilliant, twisted mind to sow this violence. They were the living embodiment of war without end, a promise of permanent victory, infinitely postponed. To imagine tools—even her own tools—turned to some different solution was like trying to wake from a nightmare. She failed more often than she liked.
“I find myself looking through a scheme,” she said, gesturing to Isadau with a cup of steaming tea, “and chortling over how it will break Geder’s army or ruin his supply lines or give weapons to the traditional families in Nus. And I realize I’m doing it again. I’m looking for ways to win the fight, not to end it.”
The Timzinae woman smiled her gentle smile. From their first shared flight from Elassae and then Birancour to now had hardly been more than a year, but it sat on Isadau’s black-scaled face like decades. The greyness at the edges of her chitinous plates made her seem fragile. “There may need to be a certain amount of winning,” she said.
“I know that,” Cithrin said. “But I don’t think past it. I get as far as That’ll show the bastards and then I just… stop. It’s frustrating.”
Isadau sipped her own tea. The steam curled up around her face, softer than clouds. “The first enemy is the priesthood,” she said, as if she were agreeing. “If we can find a way to defeat them…”
The frustration in Cithrin’s gut knotted itself tighter. “Then what? Say we did find a way to drive them all back to whatever hole they’ve been living in since the dragons fell. Would that end our problems?”
“The critical ones, yes,” Isadau said.
“Or would it only make it a war we thought we could win? Tell me that when Antea falls all the Timzinae will drop their chains, shake the hands that whipped them, and say Don’t worry about all the people you killed and the families you shattered. The priests are gone, and we’re fine now. Because I believe that they wouldn’t.”
Isadau’s inner eyelid clicked shut, leaving her both watching Cithrin and not. The rage under her surface calm was palpable. A stab of regret took Cithrin under the ribs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was too far.”
“No, I take your point,” Isadau said. “They wouldn’t. Nor would I, for that.”
“I don’t know how you fight against war. Even the words don’t fit.”
They lapsed into silence for a long moment, two women who had once been voices of the Medean bank, neither of them welcome or safe in the cities she’d called home. The damp of the city air made droplets on the palm-wide panes of window glass. Isadau’s expression was angry, then closed, then amused.
“At least you’ve ended the age of usurpers,” she said. “Not, perhaps, the task we’d set ourselves, but not an inconsiderable windfall.”
“How did we do that?”
“We took the power of gold and married it to the crown,” Isadau said. “Who’ll ever rise against King Tracian when as soon as he falls, all the coins in their chests turn into leaves and ink?”
Cithrin waved the comment away as if she were fanning smoke. “All it means is that whoever cuts off his head and takes the throne will have to offer the same guarantees he did. Kings are just as disposable as they ever were.”
“But bankers aren’t.”
Cithrin heard Komme Medean’s half-joking voice in her head. Cithrin bel Sarcour. Secret queen of the world. This was what he’d meant, then. Whatever house rose or fell in Northcoast, whoever sat the throne would need to keep on good terms with the bank, because as soon as the kingdom lost confidence in the worth of the letters of transfer, everyone from the boys selling pisspots to the launderers for bleach to the highest lord in court would be bankrupt. The worth of gold had always been a shared fiction about a soft and shining metal, but now it was also braided with a crown and a bank. The loss of any would shake the confidence in all three, and so long as the powerful understood that, perhaps it was less likely that a usurper could rise up. Or at least not without her permission. There was a giddying thought.
“So,” Cithrin said. “We only need to design something like that that we can apply to the world as a whole, and the problem… well, it won’t vanish, but we’ll put a blanket over it anyway.”
“An end to all war,” Isadau said. “Next we’ll be tying ropes to clouds and having them carry us across the sea to Far Syramys.”
“Well, if not an end to war, at least an alternative to it. That’s a bit less grandiose.”
“Do you think so?”
“A bit,” Cithrin said with a shrug.
A soft knock came as the workroom door opened, and Paerin Clark leaned in, his pale face an icon of amusement and a cynical sort of wonder. “Forgive my interruption,” he said. “I have someone in my sitting room I think you two might like to meet.”
Cithrin put her tea down with a clatter. Isadau rose to her feet. Cithrin’s expression was a question, but Paerin either didn’t see it for what it was or else chose not to. He led the way down the brickwork hallway with its ta
pestry hangings and crystal-and-silver candle holders. The melting beeswax still held a ghost of autumn honey. Thick woven rugs gentled their footsteps, so Cithrin heard the voices coming from the sitting room well before they reached it.
Paerin Clark didn’t bear the name Medean, though his wife Chana did. She sat now at her father’s side, her smile demure and warm in a way that made the hair on Cithrin’s neck stand up. Komme Medean, his joints only somewhat swollen by gout, warmed his hands at the fire. Yardem Hane stood by the door, his expression unreadable apart from the interest in his forward-pointing ears. Captain Wester leaned against a low teak table, his arms crossed. And opposite him, Barriath Kalliam and an older woman.
The last news Cithrin had had of Barriath placed him in Sara-sur-Mar, taking the role of the mythical Callon Cane and funding bounties against the Antean army that his brother Jorey Kalliam led. Seeing him here now was a shock, and Cithrin’s mind took hold of it at once. The bounties were no longer being offered in Birancour. They had been compromised, perhaps. Or the queen had decided that antagonizing the soldiers who had already sacked one of the great cities posed too great a risk. For a moment, she was lost in a cascade of implications that his presence set in motion. The woman at his side seemed almost an afterthought at first.
She was older, and a Firstblood. Her hair was done up in a prim bun, and her skin had the ruddiness of the naturally pale who had been roughened by the sun. She could have been a caravan carter or a farmer, but her bearing was elegant and easy. Here among people of violence and wealth, she was at ease. More than that. Relaxed. Her hands, folded on the table, had a scattering of age spots, but they were strong. The woman’s gaze met Paerin as he brought the two magistras-in-exile into the room. The new woman nodded to Isadau with grace, but her eyes sharpened when they met Cithrin’s gaze.
She felt a wave of unease. For a long moment, she couldn’t place the woman. There was only a sense of the familiar and a half memory of terrible violence. Of blood and fear. It was as if a figure from Cithrin’s nightmares had stepped in among the flesh-and-blood of her daily life, and the dread that tightened her throat was inexplicable. Then the woman moved her shoulders, and something about the motion brought her full memory back.
“I suppose,” Paerin Clark said, “that introductions may be in order.”
“Of course not,” Cithrin said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Lady Kalliam.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” Clara Kalliam said, rising to her feet. She wasn’t a large woman, but she seemed to radiate a strength that Cithrin didn’t remember of her. Of course the last time they’d spoken had been moments after Geder Palliako had slaughtered Lord Dawson Kalliam in front of the Antean court. “For that matter, I wasn’t at all certain I would know you, other than by reputation. As it happens, I do. I think you were very kind, the last time we spoke. Though I admit my recollection of the day isn’t what it might have been.”
“It was a terrible time,” Cithrin said.
“One of several, I’m afraid.”
Isadau cleared her throat. “Cithrin has an advantage over me.”
“Magistra Isadau,” Paerin Clark said, “Clara Annalise Kalliam, formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells, mother to the Antean Lord Marshall Jorey Kalliam and also our own ally Barriath. And also, it seems, to a spider priest named Vicarian who’s still in Porte Oliva.”
Isadau extended her hand, and Clara took it warmly.
“I also have a daughter,” Clara said, “but she often finds it more comfortable to distance herself from me, poor dear.”
“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Barriath said. His voice was oddly childlike, as though the thought of his mother and sister being at odds distressed him. It wasn’t at all the reaction Cithrin expected of the exile of empire and pirate commander. She found it oddly endearing.
“Forgive me, Lady Kalliam,” Cithrin said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but are you here as an ally or a prisoner?”
The older woman laughed and took her chair again. “That is a fine question, isn’t it? I am here as a messenger and a spy.”
“A messenger from the Lord Marshal,” Komme said. “And a spy, it turns out, for us.”
Marcus made a small grunting sound that was probably some version of a laugh. “You recall how Kit and the players and I all spent weeks in Camnipol looking for the mysterious man who’d been feeding Paerin information on the Palliako’s court? It’s her. The handwriting matches. She’s been behind the struggle against the spider priests almost before we were.”
A rush of joy filled Cithrin. New intelligence of the Antean army, and more than that. A channel to feed her own information to the heart of the enemy. With someone at the Lord Marshal’s side, they could draw Geder’s army to its destruction. Only… no. She was doing it again.
“Is something the matter?” Chana Medean asked, but Cithrin waved the question away.
Komme was the one to pick up the thread. “We were just talking about our rather peculiar situation. Fighting alongside one of her sons against the other two. It seems that it’s even more complex than we’d thought.”
“Jorey’s been protecting his family. Myself and his wife and now his daughter as well,” Clara said.
“That,” Barriath said, “would be Lord Skestinin’s daughter and granddaughter respectively.”
“The same Lord Skestinin that’s in our gaol?” Isadau asked.
“Mentioned it was complicated, didn’t he?” Marcus said dryly. Lady Kalliam continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted.
“Jorey may be the man in Camnipol closest to Geder’s trust—apart from Basrahip and the priests and possibly Prince Aster—but he is not blind,” Clara said. “He knows as well as any of us the danger that Geder poses to the world. And to Antea. And to the soldiers under his care whom he has led against you. I am very sorry, by the way, about what happened in Porte Oliva. I was there during the battle and its aftermath. I grieve for your losses.”
“Thank you,” Cithrin said, then nodded, paused, shook her head. She felt as if she’d drunk too much wine. “Forgive me again. Have you just said that the Lord Marshall of Antea is ready to turn against the throne?”
“No,” Clara said. “I am saying that we need your help to save it.”
Clara Annalise Kalliam, Formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells
It was a fact well understood that a person was never a perfect match for the tales told of them. It might be something as small as Lady Caot’s reputation as having an iron will, which was true so far as it went but neglected her weaknesses for her grandson and butter tarts. It might be as great as the person of Geder Palliako, hero of Antea and champion of the empire, who was instead… what he was.
The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed. Clara knew that. Since Dawson’s death, it was the space in which she lived.
And still: Cithrin bel Sarcour.
It was a name to conjure with. The woman who had broken Geder Palliako’s heart. Who had tricked him into letting God alone knew how many Timzinae escape his grasp in the fivefold city of Suddapal. A half-breed whose Cinnae blood thinned and paled her. Or whose Firstblood taint left her thick and dark, depending from which direction one came to the question. A merchant-class woman who had outwitted the Lord Regent of the greatest nation in the world. The most hated woman in Antea, and so also secretly beloved.
It was legend enough to carry a full lifetime, and she looked hardly more than a girl. So terribly young to have so much on her shoulders. And yet the impression she gave, sitting there among professional killers and hard-headed men of business and power, was one of naïve brilliance. A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible. Apart from Geder himself, Clara couldn’t think of anyone she had met who had impr
essed her so profoundly as being dangerous.
“It’s nearly too late,” the girl said to the room and to herself. “If what you say’s true, he’s run the armies to their breaking point. Past it. And the priests have already begun to schism.”
“Have they?” Clara asked.
“Seen one already,” the mercenary captain—Wester—said. “Came in ready to lead King Tracian in glorious war against your Basrahip and Antea. Light of the truth, voice of the goddess. All the same hairwash, but pointed the other way.”
“Is he still at issue?” Clara asked.
“He’s a char mark on the pavement,” the captain said. “But there’ll be more like him. And faster, once your son’s army falls.”
“Does the one lead to the other?” Clara asked.
It was the Tralgu that answered. Yardem Hane, he’d been introduced as. He had a low, rolling voice that was beautiful in its way. “Retreats always invite a certain amount of chaos, ma’am. Gives the impression that no one’s in control. Takes time for things to calm back down.”
“But,” Komme Medean said through a vicious scowl, “with these fucking priests spreading lies no one can see through—themselves included—every little whorl becomes a whirlpool.”
“Has that potential, sir,” Yardem said. “Yes.”
Barriath cleared his throat and leaned forward. “If we could maintain the army as a whole and draw them back to Camnipol before they broke? And especially if we could coordinate an occupation by Birancouri soldiers who knew to watch for the priests?”