“We’ve come to see Ammit No-Thumb,” Clara said. “Perhaps you gentlemen could point the way.”
The middle one, silent until now, spoke. His voice was slow, but with a depth of intelligence that gave Clara something like hope.
“What business would you have with our Ammit?”
“I met his daughter on the Prisoner’s Span last week, and she mentioned that she had had some distress. I have a tea that might be of some use to her, and so I’ve brought it. Or will, if you’ll let us past.”
“Ammit’s no friend of mine,” the smallest said. He had taken a firmer grip on his blade. The largest took a step forward, and Vincen slid to block his progress.
“What sort of distress?” the middle one asked.
Clara hoisted her eyebrow and didn’t speak. In truth, she had nothing more than a few pinches of tobacco and a pocketful of dried apples, but she’d spoken to the girl long enough to know Ammit was a kind soul and that she lived nearby. That she would be known and thought of kindly was a gamble. The silence stretched. The smallest man glanced over his shoulder, then back.
“You’re in the wrong street,” the middle one said. “Go back to the turning and go three more toward the wall. There’s a red house with a half dozen barrels along the side. Turn there.”
“My thanks,” Clara said with a nod, then turned and walked briskly back along the narrow street. Her throat felt thin as a straw and her heart beat like a sparrow. A moment later, Vincen was behind her.
“Not so quickly,” he murmured. “Nothing like running to call the chase.”
Clara forced herself to walk more slowly, as if she belonged there. As if she were safe.
“Has it always been like this?” she asked through clenched teeth.
“Ma’am?”
“The knives and the violence. The inability to walk through the city without fear of being bled. Has Camnipol always been like this, and I didn’t know it, or is this a change?”
“Change,” Vincen said without even a pause for thought. “There’s always rough places. A taproom with a bad reputation. A street where men gather when they’re unwelcome anyplace else. But since the summer … no, it’s worse.”
“Well. At least it isn’t only that I was too blind to see it.”
The pale sky held the red and gold of sunset to the west and the deepening indigo to the east. With every day that passed, the light grew a little longer, the morning a little brighter. First thaw would, she guessed, come early this year. She hoped it was an omen of a gentler year, but she couldn’t bring herself as far as belief. She walked north, Vincen at her side. He didn’t take her arm, but stood near enough to her that she could take his if she chose. It seemed the whole of their relationship, writ small. When she passed the turning that would have taken them to the boarding house, he didn’t so much as break stride.
Dawson Kalliam, once Baron of Osterling Fells and her husband of decades, had no grave. After his execution, the body had been taken to the Silver Bridge and cast into the Division like common trash. Somewhere, far below, his bones lay amid the water and chaos. Tradition set the penalty for retrieving him for a gentler burial to be death, and Clara felt sure it would be upheld. And so every few days she found herself walking out to the middle of the span to spend a moment with the high and open air that had swallowed the last of her husband.
Below her, the pigeons turned in their flock, gliding on the drafts and perching on the Division’s deep sides or the lower, lesser bridges that spanned the gap farther down. She closed her eyes and bowed her head as she’d seen her mother do before her own father’s ashes. It was what a woman did when she was remembering a man who had been her heart and was gone. It wasn’t the first death she’d mourned. She’d lost her own father, her own mother. A brother taken by fever when she’d been hardly more than a girl. She knew what to expect, and how terrible it would be. How terrible it always was. The knowledge took nothing from the pain, or if not nothing, surely not enough.
After a time, she took a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbed away the tears, and walked back to the edge of the span where Vincen was waiting. He knew why she came, and he would not cross with her. Most times, she let the small courtesy pass uncommented. Perhaps it was her growing despair or the aftermath of fear, but today she paused before him, tilted her head, and considered him.
Vincen Coe stood only just taller than she did, his darker eyes cast down only a degree to meet hers. His hair was the light brown of oak leaves in autumn. His jaw was perhaps a little too broad, his nose bent slightly from some long-healed break. This was her self-appointed protector, this huntsman trapped in the treeless paths of the city. He had stolen a kiss from her once, and it had tasted of blood. He’d sworn a kind of love for her, and she had dismissed it because it was ridiculous. And then she had sent him away, because perhaps it was growing less ridiculous.
And that odd, half-acknowledged attachment had saved her life again today.
“Why are you here?” she asked. The question had become something of a ritual between them, and his smile meant that he’d understood her. Why are you not off chasing some girl your own age? Why do you persist in wasting your own life in service to mine? How can I put so much trust in anything so clearly absurd?
“My lady,” he said, as he often did, “you saved me when I was lost, and I will follow you forever, if you let me.”
Clara shook her head impatiently, and Vincen smiled. A dark cart drawn by a black horse clattered by. A crow called out and another answered back, or else its echo. She took his arm, folding her own around it as an aunt might a favorite nephew.
“You are a child.”
“I’m older than Jorey.”
“Jorey is my son.”
“And wed.”
“So it’s not that you’re young, it’s that I’m old,” Clara said, laughing. “Lovely.”
“You’re more beautiful than most women half your age.”
After her mourning on the bridge, the flirtation was like a drink of sharp wine, cleansing and astringent with a thick aftertaste of guilt. Her husband wasn’t a full season dead. Her children were scattered to the winds, and her house was disgraced. Trading honeyed barbs with an infatuated young man, walking with her arm in his, was scandalous, low behavior, and a part of her soul cringed even as she did it. But another part swelled and stretched and unfurled.
Sometimes she felt she was two women at once. The grief-crippled widow who wept every night and forced a smile every morning was one, and she was undeniable in her sorrow. But in the heart of her disgrace and loss, there was another woman. Not a younger one, but one who had caught the scent of a freedom unlike any she’d ever known, and who was dreadfully hungry for it.
From the time she’d been old enough to put on a dress, she had been a woman of the noble class. Her path had been trod by generations, and led more or less to the same grave that held their dry bones. The world was disrupted now, broken, and she was no one. What scandal could touch her that would compare with what she already carried? Even if the highest names in the court saw her now, they would turn away and pretend they hadn’t. She had ceased to matter. Her actions and opinions were impotent, and so they could be anything. She was already fallen, and so she’d been freed.
It was an illusion, she knew. All actions carried consequences, even among the disgraced. But it was a convincing illusion, and it gave her hope that the world she had lost was not the only world there was.
“Can I …” Vincen said, his voice breaking into her reverie. She was surprised to see how far they had walked in silence and how close she had been holding his arm. “I’m sorry, m’lady, but can I ask?”
“I reserve the right to lie,” she said cheerfully, but the moment of light repartee was gone, and the words sounded hollow.
“Why are you here?” he asked. “What is it we’re doing?”
“Walking home before sunset for another bowl of your cousin’s somewhat purgatorial stew, I believe,” Clara said.<
br />
“Not that, ma’am. I mean that every day, we speak to people and find out what we can. Put together what’s happening in the city and in the empire like we’re tracking broken twigs and scat. But … well, but what is it you hope to do after?”
It was a powerful question, and one that Clara knew she’d avoided asking herself. Thus far, truly, she’d done nothing. To wander the city and make what connections she could was a benign occupation for a widow living on her son’s limited charity. To conspire against the throne … well, it had an air of danger and romance about it, but what precisely it meant was an open question.
In truth, she didn’t hate Geder Palliako. She had heard from her son Jorey of the burning of Vanai. She knew of Palliako’s thwarted impulse to kill the entire noble class of Asterilhold. She had listened to him slaughter her husband as a traitor, though she hadn’t had the strength to watch. If she had swallowed darkness and sworn revenge, no one could have argued that it hadn’t been earned. But she had also seen Palliako frightened and at sea among the young women at her son’s wedding. He had been at her side when the treachery of Feldin Maas had been exposed. She felt about him the way she did about fire or flood or a blight that took a season’s crop. He was merely a catastrophe. One might fear the flames even as one stood against them, but to hate them was absurd.
But what, then, was to be done?
“Tell someone, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. “Preferably someone in a position to do something about it. Surely there will be a dissenting group within the court that would—”
“Know and recognize you? Palliako’s sent his private guard for you once already.”
“He didn’t keep me,” Clara said, but the point was not lost on her. There had been others to go before Geder’s odd religious tribunal who had not been so fortunate. And the next time she might not be either. The winter sun slipped down behind the roofs and walls of Camnipol, the sky fading to a soft grey. The taprooms and coffee houses lit their lanterns, the sounds of music and song curling out to the streets, but even that seemed strained and martial. It would have been pretty to believe that the poison in the blood of Antea was only Geder Palliako, but if she were to be honest, she knew it had already spread. Her kingdom had caught a fever, and it would be years before it was well.
If she hoped to avoid that, she would need to be discreet. Happily, she’d been raised as a woman in the royal court where discretion, subtlety, and the tacit control of information were already something of a blood sport. Clara had never indulged in the destruction of another woman’s reputation herself, but she’d seen it done often enough. She had sometimes stepped in to mitigate campaigns waged against her or her friends and allies. This wasn’t so different.
When the intention was to undermine without being thought to do so, it was often wise to begin outside one’s normal circle and let the gossip travel in, though what that would mean in this case wasn’t perfectly clear. And anyone she did turn to would themselves need to be discreet, which was always a problem as so many people who came in possession of a secret seemed incapable of restraining the urge to brag about it …
The sound that came from her throat was low and brief, something between a laugh and cough, and it spoke of profound satisfaction.
“My lady?” Vincen Coe said.
“I’ll have an errand for you tomorrow. Find a courier headed for Northcoast who can accept an extra letter.”
“We have allies in Northcoast?”
She smiled and patted Vincen’s arm, but she didn’t answer, because there was no advantage in his knowing her intention. Discretion began at home.
Back at the boarding house, she spent a coin for three sheets of rag paper and thimble of ink. Paying for a courier would tax her allowance badly. She would be living on yesterday’s bread until the next handful of coin came from Jorey, but it couldn’t be avoided. She sat alone by the light of a candle, composing the letter in her mind for fear of wasting the paper.
Sir,
We have met, but I cannot think you would remember me. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer not to identify myself to you at this time. You have been represented to me as a man of both tact and influence, and for this reason, I wish to share with you some observations I have made concerning affairs in the city of Camnipol and also my concerns for what these observations portend.
To begin, the Lord Regent has, under the pretext of raising barracks for the guard, begun the construction of prisons within the city walls. I have reached that conclusion for the following reasons …
Even with her script tight, small, and as legible as she could achieve, she ran short of paper before things she wished to say. One fact flowed gracefully into another, each observation building on the ones before. She kept the tone calm and conversational, giving room for the reader to draw his own conclusions rather than impressing her own upon him in any but the most unobtrusive way. When she was finished, she sewed the edges herself, fixing the threads in a simple knot. She addressed the outermost face in a single line.
Paerin Clark, Medean Bank, Carse.
Geder
That they remain unprepared,” Lord Ternigan said. “That is our best advantage.”
The map of Sarakal lay unfolded on the table, the four men looking down at it as if to divine some secret teaching from the shape of its borders. Geder had chosen Ternigan to be Lord Marshal for the invasion. Lord Skestinin, as always, commanded the navy that was even now leaving the far northern seas for the warmer southern waters. And Lord Daskellin, ambassador to Northcoast, whose duty was to see that the northern border of the empire was protected by a wall of friendship and promises while the blades and bows traveled south. They were the war council. They and, of course, Basraship.
The hunt had come here last, to the holdings at Watermarch, winter almost at its end. The holdfast was perched on a high granite cliff that looked over the wide sea to the east. The trees in the garden outside the wide window were only sticks, but their brown had the first blush of green. The thaw was coming, and in days. Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch, had set aside a full wing of his home for this meeting, even the most trusted of servants sent away. It was the inner council. The last secret meeting.
“Food’s an issue,” Daskellin said. He stood between Geder and the wide windows, the light behind him and the darkness of his skin conspiring to make him seem more silhouette than man. “After the struggles in Asterilhold and then the unrest all through the summer, we were looking at a thin spring to begin with. Things are uncertain and unsettled, and people want to feel that the storm’s passed.”
“There won’t be any fighting there,” Geder said. “There won’t be any fighting anywhere in Antea.”
“It’s not only this crop I’m thinking of,” Daskellin said. “Fielding the army takes food, but it also takes farmers.”
“That’s what those roaches in Nus are counting on,” Ternigan said. “We’ll be fine. Once we take their granaries, we’ll hardly need support from the Kingspire at all.”
“Those granaries are set to feed their cities, not our army,” Skestinin said, scratching his beard.
“Being conquered is sometimes uncomfortable,” Ternigan said, and the issue was dismissed.
Sarakal was a thin nation, dominated by the port city of Nus in the north and the river city of Inentai in the south. Between them were the flint hills and farmsteads, villages and minor holdings of the traditional families, linked by the pale green thread of the dragon’s road like beads on a string. Antea was the center of Firstblood power in the world, and Sarakal was the center of nothing. Its traditional families were mostly Timzinae, though there were some Jasuru and Firstblood, and the cities ruled by a high council drawn by lot every seven years. The influence of Borja and the Keshet showed in its casual attitude toward the nobility of blood and its heaping on of invented titles. A wealthy man of a traditional family might have himself declared prince or regos or exalt without any duties or holdings to come with the name. T
he council might strip a landholder of his rank without affecting his property or taxes.
But because of the mixture of races, the traditional families had links of kinship to Elassae and Borja, and even to the minor houses of Antea. If Sarakal had as little as half a season to prepare, the Lord Marshal and the armies of the empire might be facing pikemen from Elassae and Borjan cavalry along with the native defenses. Food and soldiers could sail from Hallskar into Nus or ride carts from Elassae or the Keshet into Inentai. To be done right—to be done well—the assault had to go as quickly and as unequivocally here as it had in Asterilhold.
In Asterilhold, where the armies had been led by Dawson Kalliam, Lord Marshal, first hero and then traitor. Even now, months after the fact, Geder saw the old man’s face twisted in rage, Basrahip’s blood on his blade. It seemed unjust that even after Dawson Kalliam’s coup had been defeated and his life ended, Geder still felt haunted by him and his inexplicable betrayal.
“Lord Regent?” Ternigan said. “Do you have an opinion?”
Geder looked at the men around the table, painfully aware of having lost the thread of the conversation. There had been a question, and now he was going to look like a fool for not knowing what it was. He cleared his throat and the beginning of a blush rose in his throat.
“Well, yes. Let me see,” he said. “Minister Basrahip? Would you care to offer an opinion?”
At his place beside the window, the priest lifted his head and smiled beatifically.
“There shall be no uprising to distract you,” he said, his voice rough and melodious. “Prince Geder has lifted up temples to the goddess, and those who hear her voice will remain true.”
“All respect, Minister,” Canl Daskellin said, “there was a temple in Camnipol last summer, and things didn’t go so well there.”
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