The Spider's War

  “And it is,” Isadau said, and tucked the bird away, “isn’t it?”

  Cithrin smiled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Isadau’s frown was so slight it barely seemed to exist. Cithrin still felt it like a thorn.

  “How are you?” Isadau asked.

  “I’m fine,” Cithrin said, lightly. And then, “I’m not fine. I don’t know how I am. Everything I had, everything I thought or felt, was bent toward getting here. All the plans brought me here, except the ones about how to handle Geder afterward, and those don’t matter anymore.”

  “You’ve won.”

  “I have, but I now that I see it, I don’t understand what victory is at all. Somehow, I thought it would mean an ending. That we’d cut away Morade’s priests and all they’d done, we’d stop the armies and the fighting, and then… I don’t know. It would be over. We’d all be together and everyone would be all right. Only that isn’t how it works, is it?”

  “It’s not,” Isadau said. “There’s only one utter ending for each of us, and it isn’t one we reach toward. Until then, it’s the next change, and the next change, and the next. And profound change, even when it’s the one you prayed for, is displacing.”

  “I didn’t think I’d have to mourn my victories.”

  “And now you know something you didn’t.”

  Out in the street, a dog barked in excitement and a woman shouted back in anger. In the distance, a murmur of thunder. Cithrin rubbed her hand across the table, feeling the grain of the wood, listening to the sound of her own skin hushing. They let the moment sit with them quietly like a third person until, gently and politely, it left.

  “Have you thought about where you want to be next?” Isadau asked.

  “I’m not sure. We need to open a branch here, and I’m either the perfect person to do it or absolutely the wrong one, and I’m not sure yet how to tell which. And then there’s Porte Oliva. I know Birancour wasn’t part of the bank’s long-term plan, but my branch there made money. With the damage to the city, there are going to be opportunities.”

  “And I think you may not technically have finished your apprenticeship,” Isadau said.

  “You must be joking.”

  “I am, and I’m not,” Isadau said. “I don’t think anyone can argue that you’re inexperienced at this point, but there are some advantages that another decade of life might offer. A shared branch, for instance. Chana Medean is drawing up proposals.”

  “Is she?”

  “Between us? I think Komme would be willing to make accommodations with you just from fear you’d start your own competing company. You have a strong position. You should think about where you would be happy.”

  Cithrin blinked. Where I would be happy. It was like a language she didn’t know.

  “I’ve come for two reasons,” Isadau said. “There’s an ambassador coming from Elassae as soon as the coronation’s done. The common wisdom has it that the bank is the ideal intermediary for forging a real treaty. We’re respected on both sides, we’re seen as neutral, though not by everyone, and the war gold in the west has become something of a fashion. They see promise in it. I’ve been asked by my country to confer with you and bring back anything that would be useful to them.”

  “Do they really think you will?”

  “They aren’t wrong,” Isadau said. “I love my people, and I will go a very long way to find justice for them.”

  “Sorry,” Cithrin said. “That’s fair.”

  “The other reason is more complex, but not unrelated. Something strange has happened with the war gold.”

  Cithrin felt herself shift forward on her chair. A glimmer in Isadau’s eyes said the other woman had noticed. “What is it?”

  “The merchant guilds in Stollbourne have started valuing debt in Carse above debt from Herez. They’re calling it a confidence discount.”

  “What?”

  “A cargo valued at fiftyweight of gold,” Isadau said, “is being paid with forty-eight if the notes are against King Tracian’s debt. The full fifty if it’s from the Herez contract.”

  Cithrin sat back. “But it’s the same gold. Or not-gold. War gold. Why would—”

  “Herez is relaxing tariffs on its blue-water trade. Komme isn’t certain yet if Stollbourne’s decision is an attempt to keep Northcoast’s trade where it is, or to call Herez’s letters into question. Either way, a weight of gold isn’t a weight of gold any longer, depending on who it belongs to.”

  “Well,” Cithrin said. “That’s… interesting.”

  “Komme is thinking of how to stop it, but—”

  “No,” Cithrin said. “No, wait. We should look at that first. There may be an opportunity in there. What happens, do you think, when you trade money for money?”

  “I’m not sure I even understand the question.”

  “I’m not either,” Cithrin said. “Let’s talk this through…”

  Cithrin had dinner brought up to them after the first hour passed. Roasted chicken with lemon and rosemary, underripe apples in honey and spice. A bottle of wine that for once she didn’t crave particularly. They talked about money and wealth and value, and how each term meant a different, if related, thing. How the war gold could disconnect them, or make the relationships more flexible. What the bank could accomplish, and what it risked by trying.

  When, near midnight, Isadau pled exhaustion, Cithrin walked her to her rooms. Her mind felt like morning light and cool water, and she was sure she wouldn’t sleep. But when she did lie down on her bed, the breeze of the Antean night slipping in at the window like a cat, she found her body relaxed and the pillow comfortable. She played scenario after scenario out in her mind: what would happen if the bank declared that debt couldn’t be transferred between nations; what would happen if it could only be traded at values they set; at values the merchants themselves set; if the bank charged one on the hundred for making the transfer; if the crown did.

  As the versions became less and less real, the half logic of dreams spinning out along lines of debt and credit, the phrase came back, as clear as if it had been spoken. And, oddly, it came back in Marcus Wester’s voice, not Isadau’s.

  Where would you be happy?

  It isn’t where, she thought. Here or in Porte Oliva or Carse. I’ll be happy. Or else I won’t. Even when I’m miserable, I’ll be doing the work I’m best at. That’s better than happiness, and there’s not one person in a thousand who can claim it.

  I’ll be fine.

  She smiled before she slept.

  Clara

  On the first day of King Aster’s coronation ceremony, they burned an empty pyre.

  It wasn’t something done as part of the ceremony proper. There was precedent for it when someone had died in a way that their body couldn’t be found or brought back for the family, so it was known generally as a sailor’s pyre, but it wasn’t for seamen this time. In an abundance of tact, no one said outright whose absent body the fires consecrated. Those who have fallen in defense of the empire was the phrase most often used. It might have meant the soldiers who’d died in Asterilhold and Sarakal, Elassae and the Free Cities and Birancour. It might have meant the bodies left unburied in the snowdrifts and ice west of Bellin or the governors and protectors of Nus and Inentai and Suddapal, lost now in the uprisings there.

  To Clara, it meant the men who’d died the day the Kingspire broke. Vicarian, the other priests, and Lord Regent Geder Palliako.

  Lehrer Palliako’s presence at the burning made the point without anyone’s having to speak. Aster was there too, his eyes red from tears or smoke. Clara sat with Jorey and Barriath, present as the mother of her sons. Her remaining sons. Sabiha and Lady Skestinin sat with her as well, and all of them wept, though not for Geder. And in the court, the grey rags of mourning were tied around the arms and throats of the representatives of all the great houses. But the sleeves beneath the armbands were green, the cloths that people used to dab away their tears had leaf-shaped embroidery, and no one had the unu
tterably poor taste to wear ossuary on their jackets. The currents of the court might not have found their channel yet, but if fashion was anything to judge from, Geder Palliako had fallen from grace with history.

  Clara wished in her heart that she could feel some pang of sympathy for him. Already, he was being painted in the stories and gossip of the court as at best an incompetent and at worst a traitor. The man who’d delivered the nation to dark wizards and foolish wars. The worst steward the Severed Throne had suffered since Lord Sellandin, eight generations back, and likely worse than he’d been.

  A priest in white robes chanted in the smoke of the pyre, calling on the traditional cult gods of Antea. After the rite was done, the fire under the empty structure still burning, Clara and the others murmured their respects and retired to a wide rose garden for a light meal. The blooms were long since gone from the bushes, of course, but the leaves were bright and lush and the thorns seemed somehow appropriate.

  Clara walked confidently among the groups, aware that she was being observed. The coronation would take almost a week to trace its arc from its funereal beginning through the formal ascension of Aster to his father’s throne and then back down to celebrations and feasts. It wasn’t the most important series of court events of the year so much as of the generation. Alliances made and broken here would set the course of the empire for decades to come. Certainly for more then her own lifetime. Clara was curious to see which groups would be most open to her, which cool and polite, which unwelcoming.

  Her expectation was that her association with the army and the bankers, the return from exile of Barriath, and the suspicion—well founded, it was true—that she’d somehow carried on Dawson’s vendetta against the spider priests after his failure would give her the whiff of brimstone that would keep all but the most adventurous from her company. She was prepared to be politely shunned.

  She could hardly have been more mistaken.

  “Is it true, my lady,” Lord Emming said, “this nonsense that Lord Issandrian’s spouting about the farmer’s council?”

  Curtin Issandrian’s nod to her was a thing of subtle gratitude. As if she alone had engineered his return to polite society after the joint catastrophes of Feldin Maas’s conspiracy with Asterilhold and Geder’s rise to power.

  “Excuse me, Lord Emming,” she said. “Which nonsense precisely?”

  “Emming here was arguing that the farmers would have released the Timzinae slaves out of loyalty to the crown,” Issandrian said.

  “We can’t begin to lower the dignity of the throne,” Emming said. “Especially now. Farmers? Your good husband was against it, I think.”

  My good husband, Clara thought. God, how strange the world could be. Geder had become a lord of darkness, and Dawson’s name resurrected as a champion of virtue. How little any of it had to do with the truth.

  “I’m surprised that you feel loyal servants of the crown lack dignity,” Clara said, smiling. “With all that’s happened, I think it’s clear that loyalty to the Severed Throne is the highest of virtues.”

  Emming’s smile widened. His gaze flickered about as if to see who might have heard her words. “Well said, Lady Kalliam. Very well said.”

  She nodded to Issandrian and then to Emming, then stepped away, her heart strangely light. Her opinion was being sought by the counselors of the throne, and in public? She paused for a cup of white wine and a bit of twice-baked bread with melted cheese on it. She sat alone on a stone bench that overlooked the milling group as she ate.

  Jorey and Sabiha stood at the end of the garden, arm in arm, speaking with a group their own age. She had to remember not to think of them as children. All were adults now, married and with children of their own. Jorey had the too-thin look of a man still recovering from desperate illness, but his smile was warm, and when he glanced at Sabiha, it was with a tenderness that Clara could only see as a good omen. Barriath was there too, wearing a uniform of naval cut, though without any markings to show his rank or position. He stood with Canl Daskellin, whose hair had gone entirely white since King Simeon’s death. They were smiling, and if she was reading Barriath’s hand gestures rightly, he was telling the story of how he and his impromptu pirate navy had bested Lord Skestinin. Lord Skestinin, who even now was making his way back from Northcoast, no longer an honored guest of King Tracian. Or, more accurately, of the Medean bank.

  Everyone, it seemed, was anxious now to have been against Geder Palliako all along. Or at least to appear to have been. She expected that over the course of the season, the tales of who had been conspiring to carry Dawson Kalliam’s legacy would spread and elaborate. It would be difficult to argue her away from the center of the story, though. Her and her boys. Her fallen house. Her husband. That little of it was true and what was hadn’t seemed at all as clean and clear at the time only meant it was history, she supposed. Playing the loyal traitor would be a fashion for a year or two, until the next thing came along. Or the people who despite everything still believed in the spider goddess felt safe enough to show themselves again.

  Barriath laughed, shook Daskellin’s hand, and made his way over to her. Clara lifted a hand to him, and he kissed it as he sat at her side. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes bright.

  “You’ve had some news,” she said.

  “A bit,” Barriath said. “Just a bit.”

  Barriath grinned at her, barely able to control himself but enjoying the chance to tease her curiosity. Clara lifted her brows and batted her eyelashes, a parody of a young coquette, and her son laughed. “Daskellin’s been in with Aster and Mecelli these last few days. Part of the coronation’s going to be a formal amnesty.”

  “I’d hope so,” Clara said. “If there wasn’t an amnesty, half the men here would be honor-bound to kill you.”

  “Not for me. For Father. This time next week, I’ll be Baron of Osterling Fells.”

  Clara felt the air go out of her lungs. She put down the wine. “Barriath. That’s… that’s…” Wonderful. Absurd. Utterly confusing.

  “We’ll have the holding by winter,” he said, “and the mansion here in the city. You won’t have to stay in that tiny place of Skestinin’s.”

  “Or a boardinghouse,” Clara said, and her son laughed as if it were a joke. As if that weren’t something she’d done. A woman she had been. He went on, and she listened with half an ear. With the barony restored, Jorey would be expected to go to the priesthood, but with a military career already behind him and all the local cults in disarray after the disaster of the Righteous Servant, it seemed more likely he’d retire from service. At least until the next war came.

  It was such exceptionally good news that Clara couldn’t understand why it landed on her heart with such weight. Her family restored. Her status regained. Her sons in places of honor and respect in the court. Her remaining sons. Her sons besides Vicarian.

  You’ll become a joke in the court.… Can you imagine what that little girl’s life will be like if the name she took from you comes to carry the reputation for fucking the servants?

  “Ah,” she said, the implications of Barriath’s news unfolding in her mind like a poisonous bloom.

  Barriath’s brows knit, but only a little. “Ah?”

  “Remembered something,” Clara said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing you need be concerned about.”

  He rose and kissed her head, a gesture more informal than the gathering, but almost certainly it would be overlooked. “It’s a bad day for our enemies,” Barriath said.

  “It is,” she said. For our enemies, and for others.

  The sorrow and regret and deathly dread lay in her breast like a dead thing. Vicarian had been spider-ridden, but he hadn’t been wrong. Her dignity wasn’t only hers any longer. And Vincen…

  She found quite suddenly that the company of the court was more than she could suffer. It wasn’t the others. They walked and ate and gossiped and fought just as they always had. It was only that she couldn’t do it. Not now.

  Be
side the garden, a thin artificial creek ran along its sculpted bed. Clara walked its murmuring length, pretending to admire the stonework and the statuary. She took out her pipe and filled it with leaf, struck it alight. The smoke tasted good. Familiar, at least. She would always have tobacco among her little pleasures.

  The stream ended in a narrow grotto with benches around a rough stone god of some sort with several arms and two faces on his head. She didn’t know what it was meant to represent or who might have worshipped so odd and awkward a figure. She’d meant to sit alone for a time and gather herself there, but when she reached it, the benches were not empty.

  Lehrer Palliako sat hunched forward, his elbows resting on his knees. The white-salt tracks of dried tears striped his cheeks, but his eyes were dry now. Dry and fixed and empty. Clara thought of retreat, stepping back unnoticed to give the man room for his grief. Before she could, he spoke.

  “He was a good boy,” Lehrer said. “They don’t say it now, but he was a good boy. Smart. The books I have that he translated? There are some that don’t exist anywhere else in the world except for him. I never told him how proud I was.”

  Clara came forward and sat at the man’s side. “Losing a child,” she said.

  “Fuck losing a child. People lose children all the time,” Lehrer said. “I know that sounds small of me, but it’s true. People have lost their babies all through history. Fevers and fights and stupid accidents. No one’s ever lost my boy before. No one will again. It’s not the same.”

  “It never is.”

  “Never is,” he echoed. “Never.”

  Clara took his hand, and for a moment, it was like holding a dead thing. Then his fingers twitched. How odd, she thought, that everyone, whatever they were, whatever wounds they left on the world, had someone who would mourn them. Someone who loved them and felt their loss.