Clara suppressed a smile. Mecilli had written to Issandrian.
“I suppose it might only have been Dawson’s temper,” Clara said. “He would sometimes see what he chose to see.”
“We’re all like that, one way and another.”
So we are, she thought.
Issandrian’s private study was a thing of beauty. If all the rest of this manor house was gone slightly to seed, this, at least, was maintained. The windows looked out on a small garden, and a stone Cinnae woman looked back, her skin the mottled texture of granite, ivy curling up her side. A whole wall was taken up with books, the leather spines in a dozen different shades. Clara sat on a divan of yellow silk and pretended to look out the window at an angle that let her watch Issandrian’s ghostly reflection in the glass. He took a parquet box down from a shelf and began extracting bundles of folded paper, each wrapped in ribbon. One, she guessed, for each correspondent. As his attention was on the pages, she unwrapped the shawl and pushed it discreetly between the divan and the wall. Her heart was beating fast. Everything was going so well, it was difficult not to giggle.
“Your gardener is doing a lovely job,” she said.
“Hm? Oh, yes, I suppose so. He seems a little tolerant of snails and slugs sometimes.”
“I suppose they need their advocates too,” Clara said.
Issandrian sighed and sat behind his desk.
“I’m sorry, but there is no letter. If there was one, it never arrived here. There was a time I pinned some not inconsiderable hope on hearing a kind word from your husband.”
“Well,” Clara said. “Thank you for looking. It’s probably silly of me. I just hoped to find something written in his hand. We lost everything when they took the estate.”
“You know,” Issandrian said, “Palliako hasn’t named a new baron for Osterling Fells. I’ve heard tell that he’s only waiting until he can give the title back to Jorey. If he does, there may be things you only thought were lost.”
“I can hope,” Clara said.
“It’s been a bad few years, hasn’t it?”
“It has,” Clara said. A brief pang of guilt touched her. Curtin Issandrian was an unlucky man, but he wasn’t a cruel one. If anything, his errors in judgment spoke of too much compassion. To exploit him seemed … not monstrous, but rude. It wasn’t a thing that a well-bred lady would do. She rose to her feet, smoothing the fabric of her skirt, and Issandrian stood as well.
“Thank you again,” she said.
They walked back toward the main halls more quietly. Issandrian’s expression was turned inward, and his hands clasped behind his back. Without the long, flowing hair he’d once affected, he seemed older. More worn. Clara waited until they’d almost reached the main hall, then stopped.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I seem to have forgotten my shawl.”
“I’ll have it fetched for you.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, turning back. “I’m still spry enough to walk. Wait for me here, I’ll just be a moment.”
She walked with a brisk rolling gait until he turned the first corner. After that, she ran. When she reached his study, it was the work of a moment to yank her shawl back. She plucked the box from its shelf, muttering to herself as she opened it. Her fingers flew through the bundles. Alan Klin. Mirkus Shoat. Two old-looking bundles from Sesil Veren. And there. Four thin letters on cream-colored paper bound with a white ribbon. Lord Mecilli. She wrapped her shawl around them and shoved the box back into place, then hurried out of the study. Issandrian met her halfway back to the hall, and she raised her shawl in triumph.
“It fell behind the divan,” she said. “I was near to giving up when I found it.”
“I’m glad the hunt succeeded without the need for dogs.”
“That would be embarrassing. Setting out the hounds to help poor Lady Kalliam find her things. Too plausible, I suppose.”
“Not at all.”
At the door to the street, she turned to him, placing her hand on his arm as she might with an old friend. Issandrian put his own hand over hers. There was no sense of flirtation, but rather a kind of shared sorrow. For a moment they stood there, old enemies from a conflict that no longer mattered. His stolen letters were in her other hand, and she felt the urge to apologize, not for what she’d done, but on behalf of the world. That they, who should somehow have been friends were not, and would not be. The moment passed, and Clara walked out into the street and turned south for her rooms, Vincen Coe at her side.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
Back at the boarding house, Clara untied the white ribbon and laid the letters out on her bed while Vincen retrieved two more lamps from unused rooms. Clara read over each of the letters, searching for particular words and phrases, the personal idioms that would mark a letter as coming from the man himself. There were several. He was quite fond of the phrase in the unfortunate event that and the word abysmal. Then she took note of the specifics of his hand and the way he formed his letters. She needn’t match it perfectly, of course. The note she intended to write in his name was something written quickly and in a state of agitation. Even if Lord Ternigan were to have letters from the true Mecilli, it would be natural to expect some departures from the usual form.
Vincen came in behind her, a plate of stewed apples and bottle of wine in his hands. They made the room smell like a kitchen in the middle of baking sweets. Clara composed the rough draft of her letter, writing the words in her own neat hand. Then she read it to Vincen, taking breaks when he fed bits of apple between her lips and also to feed him. The wine was dry and a little harsh, and the fumes went to her head. Soon she was laughing, and Vincen with her. When he began kissing her, she pushed him away. There would be time for that later. This needed to be done quickly. If the letter reached Ternigan after Kiaria fell and he was already on his way home, the scheme would fail.
She drank water and paced until she was certain that she was sober, then drew out the pen, ink, and paper she’d prepared. She wrote the whole letter twice for practice, making note of where the loops and lines of her own handwriting deviated too far from Mecilli’s. Once she was certain, she took out the thick paper she’d bought. It wasn’t the cream color of Mecilli’s but it would do.
Lord Ternigan,
I do not have time now to wait and consider. The council I have heard has convinced me that we must act, and act swiftly if we are to act at all. You have been away from court for all of the season leading the army, but I have no doubt you have heard of the abysmal failure that Palliako has become. As the food supplies in the city wane, his popularity among the court and the low people has begun to plummet. Half the court is laughing down their sleeves at him, but the other half—the half to which you and I belong—understand the seriousness of the problem.
I will not walk the dragon’s path as Kalliam did, but myself and my allies have determined that it is time to gently remove Palliako from the Severed Throne and put the care of the empire into more seasoned and steady hands. You have led the army with distinction. Forgive me for my candor, my lord, but time is short and I feel I must speak plainly. You are the one obvious choice. We are unanimous in our decision, and if you knew the names of the men who’ve agreed, it would astound you. I am sometimes surprised we can agree on the day of the week or the direction of the sunrise, but we have agreed upon you.
In the unfortunate event that you are not willing to make this service to the empire, I beg you to destroy this letter and never mention it again. But if you are willing, send word to me not at my house, but addressed to Lirin Petty at the Cold Hammer stables. I have an agent there who will retrieve your word and deliver it to me.
I understand this seems sudden, but I assure you it has been building for some time. If you respond, do so quickly. Palliako grows less stable by the day, and we cannot wait much longer.
Whatever your decision, please consider me your friend and ally,
Lord Ernst Mecilli
>
Clara put up her pen with a flourish and blotted the ink quickly. A hasty blotting paper covered a great number of sins. Put side by side with its fellows, hers still stood out. And it wasn’t only the paper stock. She had to hope that the differences would be ascribed to the rushed nature of the letter. For the composition itself, she thought it struck the right notes. Flattering but also hinting that the tide might turn without him. If Ternigan proved true to his reputation, he might not agree to conspire, but he would at least not close the matter definitively. That was enough for her purposes.
She folded the letter, sewed and sealed it. She had no copy of Mecilli’s signet, so she used no wax. The money she’d saved from her increased allowance would buy a fast courier. It still might be weeks before she knew whether there was a fish on her hook.
Vincen’s objection wasn’t one she’d considered.
“The Cold Hammer,” Vincen said. “You’ve spoken to them about this?”
“Not this, precisely,” Clara said. “I’ve said that if a letter arrived under the Petty name, to hold it for me. They don’t know who it will be coming from nor what it will say.”
“But Clara,” he said, and her name on his lips still had the strange joy of transgression, “they know it’s going to you. Palliako will investigate this. If he goes there, he might track the conspiracy back to you.”
“It won’t happen.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“The man who’s watching for the message was a footman in my house. When his wife birthed their first boy, I went to visit her myself. The babe was ill, and I paid for the cunning man that saved him. The man would move the sky if I asked him to,” Clara said. “Certainly, he won’t balk at a few simple lies.”
Cithrin
Marcus left her again, this time more explicably. There was less confusion. Less of the inexplicable hollowness. Half of her was angry with him for going, but the rest of her seemed resigned. He was leaving her because he felt he had to, and looking at it coldly, she agreed. She was under her own protection now. She had been for over a year. It was only seeing that her half-ackowledged hopes that it might somehow go back to what it had been—or more likely what she only imagined it had been—dashed that felt so cruel. So she took her childish sense of abandonment and added it to the list of things she had to mourn.
It was a long list.
The next Tenthday, there was no march through the streets. The occupying forces didn’t respect the tradition and had sent out an edict prohibiting groups with more than four Timzinae from gathering together in public or ten in private. The temples were empty even where the priests weren’t dead. So instead, Isadau had the little chapel in the compound cleaned with vinegar and soap. Candles and incense burned on the humble wooden altar. Cithrin left her shoes in her room in the morning and walked there, joining the others silently. Jurin, Isadau, and Kani knelt at the front in their finest clothing. Cithrin sat in the middle with the other guests who had taken hospitality in the compound and were now trapped there by the occupation. The servants sat at the back. There were considerably more than ten Timzinae in the room, but no one mentioned it. There weren’t any Anteans either.
Still, Cithrin wondered what would happen if the spider priest came back and asked whether there had been any violations of the edict. It made her uncomfortable to risk the notice of the new authorities without need. There were so many needful risks still to take that wasting them here seemed decadent.
When the time came for the priest to arrive, Yardem Hane stepped out from the hallway. He wore a dark robe that went to his feet, and the rings in his ears looked different from the usual. He lowered his eyes, gathered himself, and brought his wide chin up.
“I am not a priest of your faith,” he said, and his voice rolled through the air like a distant landslide. “Nor, any longer, of my own. I was once a holy man, though I am not now. Magistra Isadau and her siblings have asked me to speak here today, and I agreed to the request so long as I could make it clear that I am not a priest.”
Cithrin smiled. She could see the discomfort in the Tralgu’s wide, canine expression, even if the others couldn’t. Her sympathy for him expressed itself as amusement.
“I have seen a large number of cities fall. Sometimes I’ve been part of the reason that they did. Sometimes I was one of the men who’d tried to protect them and failed. But for whatever reason I was there, what I’ve seen followed a pattern, and though I make no claim to righteousness, I hoped to share that with you here.
“Often when we gather in places of worship, it is in celebration. Celebrations of marriage or of birth. The smaller celebrations of the good in our lives. Even funerals are celebrations of lives well lived. And also we come together to mourn the evil and the sorrow and the pain in the world. Our failings and the world’s. We acknowledge these to each other because, whatever our race, whatever the shapes of our bodies and the inclination of our minds, doing this makes us more human. And by more human, I also mean more holy.”
Cithrin’s amusement and embarrassment on Yardem’s behalf had fallen away. His voice was warm and soft as old flannel. Someone behind her was weeping now, and Yardem frowned in thought. His huge hands patted at the empty air in front of him.
“When a city is taken in war, the loss to those who loved what the city had been is great. But that loss is doubled because we fear to mourn it. For good reason. There are men in Suddapal now who would beat us, possibly kill us, if they felt we were disrespectful of them. In every city I have seen that suffered what your city suffers now, there is a numbness and sense of being cut off from each other. It’s a funeral where no one laughs and no one cries, and it leaves us emptier than the loss alone would have. And so, today, instead of a religious service, I was hoping we might have a funeral for the cities that we have lost. Nus and Inentai and Suddapal. And Vanai.”
To her surprise, Cithrin felt tears in her eyes. She kept her chin high. She might weep, but she wasn’t going to snivel. Yardem spoke for a few moments more about Suddapal and when he had come to the city as a younger man. How it had changed in the years since, and how he had, and how the differences in them both had given him a sense of kinship with it. Then he asked Magistra Isadau to stand, and she spoke about the innate conflict of being a woman of business with her first loyalties to power and profit, and at the same time a citizen of the five cities. And her favorite places within them. Then Jurin spoke about showing his son the cavern at the center of the commons for the first time, and walking with his grandmother to the marketplace the last time she went. He talked of the fear he felt for the children taken by Antea. And soon, Cithrin was making no pretense of dignity, nor was anyone else. One by one, the people stood and spoke or else only sobbed, and Cithrin wept with them.
She didn’t see Yardem come to her side. His hand was simply on hers, and then without knowing how it had happened, he was leading her up to the altar. The faces looked up at her, waiting for her to speak. I can’t do this, she thought, and from the back of her mind a small voice replied, Yes, I can.
“Suddapal wasn’t my city,” she said. “That was Vanai. The Antean army took it … took it from me. And they took the people who raised me and loved me, if anybody did. There was a place by the canal by the bank house where there was a little boy who sold coffee with his father, and they … they took them too. They took everything there and they burned it.”
A sorrow she hadn’t known was there opened in her, vast as oceans, and she hung her head for a moment and Yardem stepped toward her. She put out a hand to stop him, gritted her teeth, and raised her head.
“I haven’t cried. I haven’t mourned. I haven’t let myself be angry for that loss. I never felt it because feeling it would have broken me. And now, with all of you here as witness, I am broken. I am broken, but I’m not dead. And I am not finished.”
The hand that touched her shoulder wasn’t Yardem’s. Magistra Isadau turned Cithrin to her, wrapped her arms around Cithrin’s shaking
body, and pulled her close. Cithrin wept, and more than wept. She howled like a baby who’d lost her mother and her father, which she also was. She screamed into the older woman’s flesh, and she did it with half a hundred men and women watching her do it, and she felt no shame.
“Good girl,” Isadau murmured. “Oh, good, good girl. You’ll be fine. Your heart isn’t going to die. You’re fine.”
Cithrin held the Timzinae woman close and would not let her go.
It’s going to fall apart,” Yardem said. “All respect, the network was dangerous when it was only standing up against soldiers, bureaucrats, and cunning men. These tainted priests make it impossible.”
“I know,” Isadau said. “Two of the people who agreed to work with me have already missed meetings. I was able to get word out that if the priest questions you, not to answer any questions. They aren’t lying if they don’t speak.”
Yardem grunted like he had taken a blow. Isadau raised her eyebrows.
“Not speaking can be made difficult,” he said.
The courtyard had turned from lush green to leathery brown as if overnight. Autumn had come to Suddapal, and the crispness of the air said that winter would come quickly behind it. Isadau sat on a wooden stool, her body rigid and tense. Yardem stood at ease, a soldier again instead of a priest. Cithrin’s pacing contrasted with their stillness, but she couldn’t help it. Movement made her thoughts feel clearer and the knot in her belly less likely to lead to vomiting again. Fallen leaves crackled under her feet and skittered away from her toes where she kicked them.
“We have to make contingency plans,” Isadau said, “in the event I am detained by the new magistrate.”
“Why?” Cithrin asked.
“Because she’s going to be detained by the new magistrate,” Yardem said.
“She doesn’t have to be,” Cithrin said. “She can go to Carse.”
“I won’t abandon my city,” Isadau said. “I know that I can’t help for much longer. But so long as I can, I will. If anything, it’s you who should leave. I’ve written to Komme. He agrees that losing two of his magistras is worse than losing one.”