Camnipol rose on the southern horizon, still three days away. Coming from the north, it looked like a shallow hill, spiked and gnarled with bare trees and brush. Smoke rose from it like the fires of a massive army. She knew that the city was reputed to be beautiful, and perhaps as she grew closer it would become so. From here, it was not.
“You notice the way the group splits?” Paerin Clark asked her, breaking her chain of thought.
They were sitting near the cookfire. It was too warm to need the flames for warmth, but the cheerfulness of the light and the routines of long habit brought them there. She followed his gaze to another fire on the far side of the road. A bright silk tent glowed from within. Of the two dozen men and women put together by King Tracian and Komme Medean to take the pulses of Imperial Antea, only five were noblemen, and they kept to themselves. Canl Daskellin, who had broken bread with his fingers at Komme Medean’s table, was among them.
“Highborn on one side, merchant class on the other,” Cithrin said.
“It always goes like that,” the man said. He handed her a bowl. Black beans shining bright as insects and covered with a grey sauce that looked terrible and tasted like the finest cook in Birancour had made it fresh. “Do you ever wonder why that is?”
“No, I don’t,” Cithrin said. “It’s because we all know that the idea of noble blood is a sham.”
Across the fire from them, one of the other merchants chuckled. Cithrin felt a blush rising in her cheeks, but Paerin took a mouthful of his own meal and nodded her on.
“You only have to enforce boundaries where they’re being imposed,” she said. “Think about the races. It’s been hundreds, maybe thousands of generations since the dragons made the last of us. In all that time, you would think all of the thirteen races would have blended into one, but they haven’t. We’re all more or less what we would have been if the Dragon Emperor were still in the sky. There are real barriers between Jasuru and Yemmu and Cinnae. They don’t need to be enforced. They just are.”
“To clarify, though. You’re between races.”
“And has that made Cinnae and Firstblood one thing? No. But nobility? People have become knights and earls and counts through force of arms or by buying their way in. And even the highest families have a few unwelcome members living among the poor and despised. The dirty secret of nobility is that it’s another way of saying power. We may tell other stories, but when we do, it’s because we’re building fences where there aren’t any.”
“And why would that make them sit there and us here?” Paerin said.
“Because otherwise we couldn’t tell who had the greater value. Say I have ten coins that all look the same, only some will buy five bolts of cloth, but the others are worth just one. Can you picture that?”
“But all the coins look the same,” Paerin said.
The other conversations around the fire had stopped. They were listening to her. She reached for the skin of watered wine and drank a mouthful before she went on.
“Yes. So it’s in your interest not to confuse them, isn’t it? You put one set in a tent over there, and the rest by a fire over here. Because if you put them all in the same purse, you wouldn’t know if you’d drawn a coin worth five bolts or only one. We are those coins. You and I and Komme and everyone here. We’re worth one. They over there are worth five. But if you mixed us all together, you wouldn’t see a difference. That’s why everyone hates bankers so much.”
“I think we respect noble blood,” Paerin said.
“We don’t because we lend at interest. A wise loan can make a poor man rich. A unwise one can unmake the powerful. We’re the ones who can move the coins from one side to the other, and we take our living from doing it. We’re agents of change, and the people with the most to lose are right to fear us.”
Paerin Clark looked across the fire at the man sitting there. The other man nodded, and Cithrin felt a pang of self-consciousness.
“You, Magistra, have a fascinating way of seeing things,” Paerin said, leaning back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No. Be proud of it. It’s why Komme sent you.”
T
he walls of Camnipol were so thick that the tunnel from one side to the other needed lanterns in the middle. The streets within were packed as tightly with bodies and carts as the narrowest alleys of Porte Oliva. Cithrin stayed close to Paerin Clark and kept one hand on her purse. She hadn’t come all this way to let a roadside pickpocket embarrass her now. The knot in her gut had been for the most part absent during her travels. It came back now as hard as a cramp. It was like stepping into the city had stripped all her certainty from her. As if the city itself disliked her and they both knew it.
This was the heart of the empire that had changed her. An army had marched from this city. Some commander wearing Antean colors had given the order to burn Vanai, and those flames sent her skirling off on the wind like a dry leaf, every imagined life left behind. The men who had closed Vanai’s gates and set it afire lived here. They walked the streets and drank at the taprooms and might for all she knew be beside her at any moment. Magister Imaniel and Cam were dead, and their deaths began here.
She set her jaw and her resolve.
The thing she noticed first and most about Camnipol was how many Firstbloods there were. Yes, here and there she might catch a glimpse of a Tralgu wearing a slave’s collar and carrying someone else’s packages, or Jasuru litter-bearers. But of every twenty faces she saw on the streets, nineteen were Firstblood. The thing she noticed second was that many of them were drunk.
“Is it always like this?” she shouted to Paerin, two feet ahead of her.
“No,” he called back. “It’s never been like this before when I’ve been. Never seen it this happy either. Stay close. The inn’s not far.”
Cithrin clenched her teeth and pressed on. If it had been Porte Oliva, the heat of bodies and the jostling wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, only because it would have been familiar. Here, the sky was a different shade of blue and the air was thinner and everything was different.
The inn was thankfully fronting its own courtyard. No carts were trying to press their way through, no one came there who didn’t have business. Cithrin felt as if she were stumbling into it.
“Wait here,” Paerin Clark told her. He ducked into the shadows of the inn. The stone walls were like a fortification’s. Bright cloth hung from the windows and doorframes like a fine veil on an ugly girl. Someone shouted from the street, an angry buzz in the voice, and Cithrin wished that Marcus and Yardem had come with her. The journey to Carse had been one thing. It had been a move against Pyk Usterhall and the encroaching control over her bank. Coming to Camnipol had been a whim, a moment’s madness played out over weeks. She held her elbows, trying to be small.
She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help. The noise of the street was the roar of a river. Voices and iron-wheeled carts. Dogs barked, chasing rats into the shadows and then back out again. One voice was calling out an offer of apple tarts and two coppers each. Another promised a play at dusk. Another merely shouted invective and abuse.
Cithrin’s heart began to race before she knew why. The voice announcing the play. She knew it.
“Smit!” she yelled, straining to be heard. “Smit! Is that you?”
And a moment later, from very close and terribly far away, “Cithrin?”
“Smit! Over here,” she called. “I’m by the inn.”
He stepped out of the crowd like he was walking onto a stage, nowhere and then suddenly there. His eyes were wide with surprise and delight, and Cithrin ran over to him, throwing her arms about him. He whooped and lifted her in the air.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as her feet touched ground again. “I had you playing the magistra for a long run.”
“Still am,” she said, not taking her arms from around him. Of Master Kit’s players, she’d never been as close to Smit as she was to Cary or Sandr. Or Opal, though that didn’t bear thinki
ng of. But having Smit here in the middle of the strangeness and far, far from home made her reluctant to let him go, and he didn’t object. “The holding company sent me with a few others to get the lay of the land with the new regent.”
“And the end of the war,” Smit said. “It was bad trade there for a time, but we’re swimming in coin now. You have to come see us. We’ve put together a version of the Lark’s Lament with all local references. Took us a long time to get all the names right, but now all the people we’re making fun of come every other show just to hear their names said. S’brilliant.”
“How is everyone? What’s Master Kit doing?”
Smit’s face darkened.
“Master Kit’s gone,” he said. “Gave over everything to Cary and headed out. Said something gnomic about killing gods and went like dandelion fluff in a high wind. Miss the hell out of that man.”
“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said. She couldn’t entirely imagine the acting company without Master Kit.
“We’ll do. Cary’s a damn bit harder on us, but she’s got a good eye. And the new one, Charlit Soon—d’ya know her?”
“Met her a few times,” Cithrin said, and someone bumped Smit forward into her.
“You two get some privacy!” a man’s voice shouted. “Don’t care to see you rubbing on each other!”
“Lick my ass!” Smit yelled over his shoulder. “Anyway, she’s gotten better. Really growing into the roles.”
“And Sandr?”
“Sandr’s Sandr.”
“Well. Pity, that.”
“I’ll tell him you said so,” Smit said with a grin.
“You won’t,” Cithrin said, taking her arms away for the first time and hitting him lightly on the shoulder.
“You’ll come see us, though? We’re at a taproom called Yellow House. Not the cleverest name, but it’s hard to mistake since the whole place looks like it’s painted in yolk. It’s just at the edge of the Division by the one bridge. Autumn. Autumn Bridge.”
“What’s the Division?”
“Big crack down the middle of the place. Yellow House, by Autumn Bridge. Say that?”
“Yellow House by Autumn Bridge,” she said, and he patted her on the head like a puppy.
“Know your lines already. I’d best go. Lots of players in this town. We’ll want our share of audience.”
“Tell the others I said hello,” Cithrin said. “Tell them I miss them.”
“Shall,” Smit said, and then the flow of the street took him again. She heard his voice calling the play. Faint, fainter, and gone.
When she turned, Paerin Clark was in the doorway of the inn. His expression hovered in the no-man’sland between scandalized and amused. Cithrin walked to him the way Cary had taught her, low in the hips and steady. The walk of an older woman. When Paerin spoke, his voice betrayed nothing.
“Did I just see the voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva embracing an actor in the street?”
“The voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva is a many-faceted woman,” Cithrin said. “Do we have rooms?”
“We do. I thought I would tour you through the city, if you’d care to.”
“I would be delighted,” she said, offering him her elbow. He took it with a bow.
Camnipol, now that she wasn’t quite as overwhelmed by it, was a city of grim and terrible beauty that was at present dressed in its holiday ribbons. The dark stone and grandeur of the buildings showed through once she knew to look for it.
The great chasm of the Division stood in the center of the city, the great architectural wound exposing the bones beneath the foundations of the buildings. The Silver Bridge they crossed to reach the Kingspire had no particular silver about it, but great timbers that creaked and swayed over the abyss. At the bridge’s edge, she stopped a girl and asked which was the Autumn Bridge, for later. The girl pointed south with a pitying expression as if Cithrin had asked if the sky was up or down.
The Kingspire itself was astounding. It was easily the largest tower Cithrin had ever seen, and she was willing to believe it was the largest in the world. And all around it, the mansions and estates of the high families, the tombs of the dead, the temples. She stopped before one with a massive red pennant with an eightfold sigil at its center. Paerin Clark looked up at it and then down at her, but she only shook her head—some wisp of memory come and gone without leaving its name—and they walked on.
When, near dark, they came back to the inn, Cithrin’s feet ached, but the knot in her gut was less than it had been. Not gone, but a half a skin of wine with a bit of meat would let her sleep, she thought, even in an unfamiliar bed. Paerin Clark sat with her in the cramped common room.
“It’s a lovely city,” she said. “But I can’t think you came here just to walk me around.”
“No, we only had an evening, and it seemed pleasant,” he said. “Tomorrow, the work begins. I have two merchants not far from here that we’ve had dealings with. I’ll want to speak with them. And then another one, less reputable, who works down the side of the Division.”
“Down the side?” she said.
“Not the highest-rent part of the city,” Paerin Clark said ruefully. “Picturesque, but the foot traffic’s terrible.”
“That can’t be someone very important.”
“Not very rich,” Paerin said. “That’s not the same thing. Knowing the taste of a city’s cream isn’t the same as drinking the dregs. We want both. And you’ll be with me when I go.”
She nodded and took a mouthful of wine. It wasn’t very good, but it was strong. That was better than being good. The warmth was resting comfortably in her belly, and starting to spread out toward her shoulders and face.
“So am I with you because I’m being kept on a leash, or because I’m being trained for something?”
“Trained,” he said without a space between the words. “I spoke with Komme about this before we came. I spoke with him about you when I first got back from Porte Oliva, for that matter. We agreed that you were an investment worth making despite the risks. You have a good mind for what we do. More experience than anyone your age has a right to. And you understand how we work.”
“Which makes me your best ally or your worst enemy,” she said.
“Yes. Or possibly something else, but regardless of interest.”
Cithrin smiled.
“I will do it, you know. All this? I will do what’s called for to get it.”
“I think you will,” Paerin Clark said. “But I have been wrong before, and I won’t do a thing to keep you from falling. You’ll stand on your own strength or you’ll leave. But I’d rather you stood.”
“We understand each other,” she said.
“Good. Once we’ve done with my acquaintance on the Division, we’re both for the tailors. We’ll need better clothes than we’ve packed. Our very good friend Canl Daskellin is holding a private meal at his estate tomorrow. Several people will be there who would be very interesting to speak with.”
“You’ll tell me what to listen for before we go?”
“Of course.”
“And after the meal?”
“After the meal, we will go to the Kingspire. Lord Marshal Kalliam is having his revel, and the regent and the prince will both be there. And then, Magistra, we’ll see what’s worth seeing.”
Geder
G
eder rose to his ritual humiliation. His servants powdered him, dressed him, and prepared him for the grand and glorious world. He told himself, as he did every morning, that the servants barely noticed what he looked like naked. And even if they did, he was the Lord Regent, and their opinions of him ought not matter. But always in the back of his mind, he imagined them giggling when he was safely away. And his personal guard. Those men followed him almost everywhere, but never spoke to him. Never asked anything of him or laughed at his jokes. That wasn’t the same as having no opinion of him. It was beneath the dignity of the regent to ask them, of course, but how could he keep from wondering?
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The revel itself began at dawn, well before Dawson, Geder, or Aster officially arrived. The pavilion set aside for it had been draped in pale silk, and jugglers and showfighters and tables of sweets had been brought in for the children’s revel at dawn. There would be games and competitions through the morning, with prizes given to the winners wrapped in cloth the colors of House Kalliam and engraved with Dawson Kalliam’s name. Geder planned to join in at midday when the first meal came. Dawson would be there, and Lady Kalliam. And with luck Jorey and his new wife, Sabiha.
He walked through the wide halls of the Kingspire, scattering the servants and slaves by the simple fact of his presence, and he wondered what it was like for Jorey. He couldn’t really imagine him wed, even though he’d been there at the joining. To wake up every morning not to a crowd of near-strangers, but to a woman. One particular woman. To be naked before someone whom etiquette didn’t require to look away. The thought alone was enough to make his chest ache, just a bit.
And now, how would he ever know if a woman wanted him, or just the position he’d fallen into? He’d read enough about sex to understand it. There had even been diagrams in some of the books. That wasn’t the problem. It was the fear a thousand times worse than his unease with the morning’s servants that she—that unformed, universal she—would be putting up with him because he was Lord Regent. That she would pretend love or lust as carefully as the others pretended indifference. He couldn’t stand the idea.
He could order the death of kings and the destruction of kingdoms, and what he mostly felt was lonesome. Lonesome and envious that his friend had something that he couldn’t. The only one who could really understand was Aster, and Geder couldn’t talk about that kind of thing to a child. A boy he was supposed to protect and raise up to the crown. No. Impossible.