I know you have not written back to me, and I understand. You’re busy, and I am too. But I am weary, my love. I am tired to my bones, and I find I need the company of someone who cares for me. Someone I can trust. I am writing you now from the siege camp at Kiaria, but in the morning I will begin on my way south to Suddapal and, my dear, to you.
Cithrin
Neither Komme Medean nor Pyk Usterhall made any mention of Isadau or of the steady stream of refugees that Cithrin helped flee from Suddapal. The only overt sign that anything about the operations of the bank had changed was the name to which the bank reports were addressed. Without any formal acknowledgment, they simply began to act as if Cithrin were the voice of the Medean bank in Suddapal, and so it became true. It was like a cunning man turning water to wine or a stone to an orange. She was transformed by the act of their collective will.
Still, there were some details in the ciphered reports that carried more implications than others. Pyk Usterhall’s report listed a significant capital outlay for commiserative gifts, which technically meant additional payments from insurance policies that covered deaths but was also the common euphemism for bribes. Komme also recommended that all branches call in loans made to the Free Cities, Borja, and Northcoast, and that they avoid making any loans into those territories without extraordinary returns. Cithrin didn’t know whether the lives of people displaced by war fell under the heading of extraordinary returns, but thought they might.
From a financial perspective, her own reports back were the collapse of an incompetent. The branch was losing money like a slaughterhouse pig bled. Ships hired for unspecified cargo. Caravan masters employed for half a dozen off-season trips into the Keshet. Cithrin gave out loans on almost any pretext with expectation of repayment to other branches and no way to track the borrower.
Which is to say that the bank’s mechanism had reversed. What had been an engine designed for the accumulation of wealth had become a system for wealth’s application. She could imagine herself as some sort of half-divine fairy changing the world where she wished to by the careful dispensation of gold and silver, contracts and letters of credit. The difference she made was measured not in weights of precious metal, but in some number of lives and in children living outside of prisons. And she could go on with this until the coffers ran dry, and even past that, working on deficit until even the reputation of the Medean bank wasn’t enough to keep her boards from being broken.
Some nights, she would stay up late and try to calculate her efficiency. How many hundred refugees had fled danger under her watch, and how much she had spent to do it. It occurred to her more than once that the Antean Empire had placed a low price on Timzinae lives, and that she had been the one in position to buy. Those were the best nights. The worst, she thought of other things.
The logic of the world had been inverted. Cheap lives were good. Money was there to be lost. Even the opportunities that came to her were suspect.
I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Cithrin said, shaking her head at the list of names on the page before her. “Look at these. Tamar Sol. She’s that old woman who lives beside the trading house, isn’t she?”
“I believe so,” Yardem said.
“What could she plausibly be doing for the bank? Darning our socks? And this one—Witan Adada? He’s the one with the missing leg who begs at that taproom.”
Yardem sat on the divan, nodding, his ears canted forward and his hands clasped on his knees.
“Many of them are vulnerable people,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To extend the protection we have to as many people as we can?”
“Our privilege isn’t built on stone,” Cithrin said. “When we give this list to the protector, it will be a list of people immune to his authority. But it can turn into a list of people to be singled out for persecution without folding a corner. The bank is a protection as long as we’re in Geder’s good graces. I’d no more single Tamar Sol out to the protector than I’d point a wolf toward a baby. I won’t list anyone as working for me who isn’t willing to be killed because I did it.”
Yardem grunted.
“Not the best recruitment speech,” he said. “Let me take that back, and I’ll see what I can do about revising it.”
“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said, holding out the page.
“No reason to be,” the Tralgu said.
The report had come in the day before. Cithrin’s scheme for an anonymous bounty board appeared to be moving forward. Komme Medean had included a list of prices being offered for a variety of crimes against the sovereign powers of Antea, the escape of slaves, the death of soldiers from common sword-and-bows to nobles. There was even a massive reward listed for Geder’s death. They were reported as rumors with a request that all the branches reply with whatever similar schemes they were hearing of. Even if the letters went astray or Cithrin found herself being questioned by one of the tainted priests, she could truthfully say that she didn’t have knowledge of the bounties being offered by the bank or anyone else in particular. Komme’s reports said that the prizes were to be collected in Herez from a shadowy figure named Callon Cane, and she could truthfully say that was all she knew for certain. She was cultivating her own ignorance. It was just another way in which the normal logic of her world had been reversed.
Yardem walked out to the compound’s central yard, and she accompanied him. The compound was still full of the refugees and guests that Isadau had welcomed in, or else the ones who had taken their place. There were men and women and children. The stables were empty, though. The grass on which the horses had grazed was brown and dry. There was less music than there had been when the buildings had been a home for Isadau and her family. It made the place seem empty, even though it was full.
The sky was pale and strangely opalescent, and the wind carried the threat of storm without the promise of release. Yardem walked off to speak with Enen and the other house guards, leaving Cithrin to make her way out to the gate and the street. Suddapal was not her city. However long she stayed, the roads would always feel a bit too wide, the land a bit too open. She missed glazed windows and negotiations conducted in private. And still, she would have paved the seafront in silver if it would protect the people there.
She saw the protector’s men coming along the street, dark uniforms marching in a square. Not quite a threat of violence, but ready for it at any moment. And in the center of the square, the brown robes of the priest. She felt the dread in her gut, but only waited for them patiently. They might not be coming for her.
They were coming for her.
“Magistra bel Sarcour,” the priest said, bowing slightly. “I hope the day is treating you kindly.”
“It will do, I suppose,” Cithrin said through her smile. “Unless you have another one on offer?”
The priest smiled back uneasily. She’d spoken with him three or four times now. Less than she’d expected, since she’d made herself one of the more important people in the city. She couldn’t help wondering if Fallon Broot was keeping them apart out of his own unease with the priesthood. She had noticed that the friendly nonsense of banter seemed to bother the priest, so she employed it liberally.
“There was a fire last night,” the priest said.
“I didn’t know that,” Cithrin said, telling the truth.
“It was near the prison. While the protector’s men were dealing with it, someone threw a rope ladder over the back wall and almost seventy prisoners escaped.”
“Really?” Cithrin said.
“Several were the children of people in the employ of your bank.”
“And I’d imagine several weren’t,” Cithrin said. “Any in any case, it wasn’t anything the bank had a hand in, so I don’t believe I can help you with that.”
The priest tilted his head and bobbed up and down on the balls of his feet in a way that made him look like a sparrow.
“You don’t want to know which of your employees’ children were part of the attack?”
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“I don’t,” Cithrin said. “Was there anything else you wanted to ask about, or shall I return to my business?”
The priest held out a letter.
“A message came for you by military courier,” the priest said. “From the Lord Regent.”
“Oh,” Cithrin said. “Perhaps I mistook small talk for interrogation.”
She took the letter as if it were a normal thing, and not the chance that Geder had changed his mind about her and was about to have her thrown into prison. She kept her smile pleasant and her gaze locked on the priest’s. Making him look away first was a petty thing, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t be a politician in everything, and the man frightened her. She turned back to the compound. Later, she would need to go to the trading house and at least make some pretense at the normal business of the bank, but correspondence from Geder was her first priority. She went to her office and closed the doors. She put the letter down on the desk. The address on the outer fold was written in his hand. Twice, she reached toward it and pulled back. She put a book over it to keep it from blowing under a desk, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of wine and no cup. The alcohol soothed the anxiety knotting her gut, and when she was a little over halfway through, she was ready to open the letter.
… I need the company of someone who cares for me … I will begin on my way south to Suddapal and, my dear, to you.
Remembering the peace that I took from your touch, from your body, has been the only thing that—
It was like a letter written between people she’d never met. It was love and sex and a kind of raw vulnerability. If she’d only happened upon it, she would have thought it was sweet and touching. She would have imagined the woman to whom it had been written and the man who’d put pen to paper, and she would have envied them. Only she was the woman, and the man was Geder Palliako. And worse than that, she could see where this unreal version of her had grown from. She remembered feeling fond of Geder, the frightened little man who was trying to protect the boy put in his charge. She remembered watching them working puzzles with complex stories about Drakkis Stormcrow and sleeping dragons. She remembered kissing him, and more than that, wanting to kiss him.
Only now he was coming here thinking that he was still the man he’d been that summer, and she was the woman he imagined her to be.
“Well,” she said, softly and to herself. “Fuck.”
The scratching at the door startled her back to herself. The last of the wine had gone, though she didn’t remember drinking it. There was more in the kitchens, and she badly wanted another bottle. The scratch came again.
“Come in,” she said, her words perfectly sharp. One bottle wasn’t enough to leave her drunk. Tonight, three might not suffice.
Enen opened the door. A Timzinae man she didn’t know was at the woman’s side. He wore the rough cotton of a dockworker.
“Someone asking to see you,” Enen said, her voice soft and gentle in a way that told Cithrin of the fear that had brought this man, whoever he was, to her. Cithrin willed herself to sit up a little straighter. There was room enough in the chair for her and Geder’s lover; there would be enough for Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour too.
“Come in,” she said.
The man stepped in. His nictitating membranes were clicking open and closed and he held his hands in fists tight against his sides.
“I’m sorry for bothering you,” he said. “Only I heard about you from Kitap, and I thought … I thought …”
“Kitap?” Cithrin said, and the man’s face fell. Then, “You mean Master Kit?”
“Yes. You might have called him that. He used to live with my family, back before he was anything in particular. My name’s Epetchi. Maybe he talked about me? Or Ela?”
“He may have,” Cithrin said. “Now that I think of it, he may have.” She didn’t remember him saying a thing, but she knew from someone that there had been a café run by friends of his down near the docks.
“He said you might be able to help people. That you were a good person. A friend.”
Cithrin smiled the way she did in any negotiation and nodded toward the divan.
“Tell me what’s going on, Epetchi,” she said.
His niece had been one of the children taken from the prison, only she’d been hurt in the flight. He was hiding her in his storeroom, but she had a fever and it was getting worse. He didn’t dare go for a cunning man for fear that they’d be turned in to the Anteans. As he explained himself, the high whine of anxiety faded from his voice and a deeper, lower kind of fear came in. One more like despair.
Cithirin listened carefully. The fumes of the wine faded quickly, and her mind danced over the problem. Epetchi was right, of course. The protector’s guard would be watching the cunning men. The priest would be questioning them and anyone else whose work it was to give aid to the desperate and in need. When he shrugged and went silent, she pressed her fingertips to her lips and thought.
“Come with me,” she said. He followed her out to the guard room. Yardem and Enen were both there.
“Yardem, do you know of any cunning men willing to die because I put them on a list?”
“Know one I could ask.”
“Do that,” Cithrin said. “Then get him to this man’s café. He’s a friend of Kit’s.”
“My sympathies,” Yardem said seriously, and then broke into a grin. Epetchi laughed.
“You know him too, then?”
Cithrin stepped back. Yardem would see to it now. She walked through the corridors, back to the kitchen for two more bottles, and then to her room. She’d done enough of her business for the day, and if she went there, she would only read the letter again. She didn’t want to do that.
The plant that Isadau had given her that first day still sat on her sill. Its small, thick needles hadn’t gone brown with the autumn. Cithrin sat on her bed and watched it quiver in the breeze. Another good night, then. Maybe another life saved. She wondered who had engineered the escape of the prisoners. It was reassuring to know that there were others in the city who were taking action, but it was not surprising. This was their home. These were their children. If the whip ever came to their hand, Geder’s soldiers would suffer and die, she didn’t have any doubt.
She wondered how much was enough. She had already managed an order of magnitude more than Isadau could have. She had immunity for the bank that no one else in the world could have acquired, and she’d used it as best she could. But she couldn’t say it was enough. Her own argument circled back. One more day would save another few people, and how could she tell herself that the ones she would have saved were less important than the ones she already had? And one more day after that, and after that, and after that until Geder came to her door expecting a lover to fall into his arms.
And then? What were the lives worth that she could still save after that? If she fell as she was expected to, if she became the woman the letters were for, how many more refugees could she spirit out of Suddapal?
It was an exchange, just as anything was. She could maintain her branch and its immunity. She could get information about the Antean army and the spider cult. And all it would mean was becoming Geder Palliako’s lover. She tried to imagine what it would be like, standing naked before him now that she knew he’d ordered the death of Vanai, now that she’d watched him slaughter a man, now that she’d lived in a city that had been broken by his will and the will of his priests. Unpleasant, yes, but her body was only a body. Access to it was something he wanted and that she was in a position to give. And what she would gain from it couldn’t be had for any other price. This wasn’t a new equation. She’d had the same essential decision with Sandr and with Qahuar Em. Once, it hadn’t been a good trade. Once, she’d thought it was and had been wrong. Neither of those had killed her heart.
The plant shivered. Cithrin pulled the cork from her bottle and sat with her back to the cool, rough wall. The taste of grapes and the bite of the alcohol were like old friends come to
commiserate. Isadau would have died for her city, and Cithrin had bought her absence with a promise. A promise to save as much of Suddapal as she could. So in a sense, if she took up with Geder Palliako again, if she sat at his table and laughed at his jokes and permitted herself to be used by him in his bed, it would still be from love. Her love for Isadau. She drank from her bottle. She knew from long experience it would take at least one more for her to sleep tonight.
“Fine,” she said.
Marcus
The north coast of Hallskar in the depths of winter was a cold kind of hell. Marcus had known from stories he’d heard told by other mercenaries and wanderers that the storms could be vicious and sudden, that the land was harsh and unforgiving. He’d lived in Northcoast most of his boyhood, and the little cruelties of winter were nothing new to him.
He had underestimated.
“We’re all going to die!” Sandr wailed.
“Die walking, then,” Marcus shouted and leaned harder into the storm. Before them, the cart swayed in the wind. A layer of ice was forming on the left side, and Hornet had given up trying to break it off. The horses’ heads were low, their manes glazed as they pushed on. Marcus was more worried about them than about Sandr. If the actor collapsed, they could load him in with the costumes and the props. If the horses fell, they would have to stop. And if they stopped, the chances were good they wouldn’t start again.
The morning had been clear and cold enough to freeze piss when it hit the ground. The sky had given no particular sign of trouble until trouble descended. In the space of an hour, the day went from calm to blustery and from blustery to a howling gale. Dar Cinlama and the Antean expedition had been rumored to be just ahead of them somewhere along this road, but Marcus didn’t care about them any longer. Or about the spider goddess or anything other than the thought that freezing to death on a icy track in Hallskar wasn’t the way he’d hoped to die, but it also wasn’t the worst.