“I’m not sure you can accuse him of impiety, Mother,” Elisia said. “It’s his newfound piety that brought him, after all.”
“My piety’s not newfound,” Vicarian said. “It’s my appreciation for what it’s going to take to get a placement worth having. Everyone with any power at all is tripping over their toes to study under Minister Basrahip.”
“Is his cult that important?” Clara said. “Why, it seems only yesterday everyone was laughing down their sleeves at it.”
“It’s nearly the only important sect in the kingdom now,” Vicarian said. “Temples are going up in Kaltfel, Asinport, Nus. Now Inentai and Suddapal. And everyone’s assuming Kiaria, once Ternigan’s burned it clean enough for civilized habitation. All of them are dedicated to the spider goddess. Anyone who’s keeping strictly to the old rites won’t be placed there. And there’s talk of converting the temple in Kavinpol. This is the first time Minister Basrahip has taken on initiates from outside wherever he was out in the Keshet. Everyone put in for it.”
“But you got lucky,” Jorey said.
Vicarian grinned, and Clara could see for a moment the boy he’d been at six years old. “May have called in a couple favors for it.”
It was what she had hoped for, of course. After Dawson’s death, she had done everything she could to see that her children were safe, that they had the chance to reinvent themselves in Palliako’s court. She had only lost Barriath, and that to exile rather than death. And yet she sat in the dining hall with the richest dinner she’d enjoyed in months, the windows all opened, and the evening breeze setting the candles to flutter and snap, and her pleasure was tainted by doubt. She felt she was helping her boys scramble up a tree as she cut it down. But that was simplistic. If Palliako fell and a new Lord Regent took his place, the court would still be made from the same people. Rearranged by the rupture, perhaps, as they had been before and would be again.
Still, she could wish that Vicarian had saved his favors for a better occasion.
After the last of the meal was finished, Elisia made her farewells and went off, Corl and his nurse trailing along behind with her guardsmen. Clara wasn’t sure when walking with guards had become normal for members of court, but it was now. Then they sat together in Lord Skestinin’s narrow drawing room. The taste of Jorey’s tobacco reminded her what real leaf was like. She was in real danger of becoming used to the cheap-ground that sold in the alley mouths near the Prisoner’s Span. They joked and played at tiles and cards. Except that Dawson and Barriath weren’t there, it was a perfect evening, and it passed too quickly into night.
When, at last, Clara prepared to make her own farewells, Jorey took her discreetly aside.
“I haven’t been keeping you up with everything,” he said. “I didn’t want to raise hopes if I wasn’t sure. But from the last letters I’ve had, I think Lord Skestinin is going to back me at court. Between his word and Geder still seeming to like me, I think I’ll be able to take on the management of some of his lands while he’s with the navy.”
“That’s lovely, dear,” Clara said, tears jumping to her eyes. “I’m so glad for you. And Sabiha too. She’s … I’m so glad you married her. She seems simply perfect. And by that I mean strong, because strong is so important in a woman’s life, even if no one particularly says it.” She was babbling, words flowing without her knowing what they would be or if she meant them.
Jorey took her hand and pressed something into it. A small cloth purse of the sort she usually took her allowance from him in.
“It comes with a slightly better income,” he said. “Sabiha and I talked about it, and we wanted you to have part too.”
“Oh, I can’t,” Clara said, her fingers curling around the coins. Clutching them. “Really, you mustn’t.”
“I must, Mother. And I will.”
It didn’t help stop the tears. She kissed Jorey’s cheek and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“You are very good to me,” she murmured. “You have been very, very good.”
“I turned you out,” he said.
“Of course you did, dear,” she said, and for a moment, her new self spoke. The woman she was still becoming. “I will always be complicit in what your father did. It’s part of who I am now. Your distance from me was necessary, and it still is. You did right.”
“Still—”
“No, dear. No still. No if only. What your father did and what I do can’t be part of what you are. Not any longer. Don’t be ashamed of that. If I’d had more strength and wisdom, I’d have gone on my own.”
Jorey looked at his hands.
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” he said. “But thank you for saying it.”
Vincen Coe waited at door to the street, chatting with the door slave and looking in the torchlight like a servant waiting for his master. That gave Clara pause. Treating Vincen as if he were only what he had been before seemed somehow monstrous. And yet what option did she have? She could no more invite a lesser huntsman formerly in her husband’s service to sit at the table with Jorey and Vicarian than she could call Dawson back from the dead. She tried to imagine Vincen sitting in the drawing room with Jorey. Or worse, with Elisia. The familiarity with someone so clearly of a lower class would make her daughter’s eyes explode. She really was more Dawson’s child than her own. Nor would it be a kindness to Vincen to place him in a context in which the gulf between their stations was made obvious.
Sabiha was the one to see her safely to the door, to Vincen’s arm, as was appropriate after all for the lady of the household. She’d done the same a thousand times while Dawson sat in the drawing room with his dogs. Vincen stepped forward, bowing the way he would had he been only what he seemed. Clara had the sudden and powerful impulse to put the young man’s arm around her waist. Sabiha would certainly have been shocked, but she had also stepped outside what women were permitted, and shocked wasn’t the same as scandalized.
“Clara?” Sabiha said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Yes, dear, I am. Just lost in my own mind for a moment.”
Sabiha took her hands and smiled into her eyes. Clara smiled back from across a gulf as wide as the Division that only she knew was there. Then the moment passed, and Clara marched off resolutely into the dark streets of Camnipol, Vincen walking a pace behind and to the left, as a good servant would until they crossed the bridge and Clara brought him to her side. Even with his injuries and the time spent recuperating, Vincen’s arm was solid. Clara tried to remember when Dawson’s had been the same, but in truth, he hadn’t. Strong, yes. But Vincen was a degree shorter than Dawson had been, and the proportion of his arm different. Their two bodies couldn’t be mistaken. Vincen was unavoidably and utterly Vincen, and Dawson was gone past all recall. She had mourned him for a year, as best she could when she was mourning everything else and rejoicing in between.
It had been a year, and imperfect as it was, she had done the best she could. Her children were reestablishing themselves in the lives they’d chosen or forged or found.
All around them, the city was preparing for a bad winter. The men and women of noble blood knew that the food would be thin this season the way they knew a particular march, recognizing it by the first notes. The men and women in the streets of Camnipol would be the ones playing the instruments and singing the melodies. For Jorey and Sabiha and even Vicarian, it would be the difference between eating meat every day or only once a week. For Abatha and Vincen, for Aly and Mihal, it would be the difference between eating every day or every other. And as hard as winter would be, spring before the first crops came would be worse. It expressed itself in small ways: the timbre of the voices of begging children, the weariness and resignation in the shoulders of carters, the growing competition for day-old bread. Things she might have lived and died and never have known had only a very few things gone differently.
And instead, here she was, walking through the darkness with this peculiar, unlikely masculine animal at her side. They reached the far
side of the Division, passed by the great yellow taproom with the same band of players she’d seen there before in the yard, declaiming to perhaps a dozen people.
“You know that I am entirely too old for you,” she said.
“You’ve said so, m’lady,” Vincen replied as he had before.
“You should find a woman your own age.”
“None of them are as lovely as you.”
She coughed out a laugh. “And I’ll wager you played with fire when you were a boy.”
“M’lady?”
At the mouth of an alleyway she paused, and he paused with her as she had known he would. She put her hand on his shoulder and, before he could grasp what was happening, shoved him into the wall. She felt the impact in the palms of her hands. She only had to bend her neck up a little to reach his lips, and she kept the pressure constant, pinning him in place like a flower pressed in a book. Her mouth opened his, and she bruised him. For a moment, he was too shocked, and then he wasn’t. When she stepped back, he staggered.
Her breath was fast, her heart racing. The warmth in her body was strange and wild and familiar as an old coat, long forgotten and rediscovered. When she laughed, it came from low in her throat. It came from the girl she had been at eighteen.
“My lady,” Vincen said unsteadily.
“Clara, Vincen,” she said. “My name is Clara. Now take me home with you.”
Marcus
The first days of an occupation said a lot about the war that brought it about. In the best case, the new protector would reach out to the older, established powers in the city and find ways to make the habits and expectations of the citizens work gracefully under the new regime. The worst was slaughtering everyone and burning the place to the foundations. Suddapal fell in between. There were few fires, and what there were got doused quickly. Three ships sank during the sack, and given the number of vessels at the docks, Marcus suspected they’d been scuttled by captains who for whatever reason couldn’t put out to sea. The physical city itself was treated, for the greatest part, with respect. But it was the respect of an owner for their property. It didn’t bode well for the citizens.
And neither did the march of children.
Suddapal had three gaols, a legacy of the different cities it had been before they grew together. One stood safely inland with great stone walls around lines of iron cages. The second was at the top of a cliff near the shore with cells that lay open to the weather, foul or fair. The third was an island with only a single bay and currents cruel enough to defeat even the most experienced swimmers. All three had been emptied of their prisoners and refilled with the young. From his first glance at the children packed twenty in a cage meant for six, Marcus understood what he was seeing. Not a city folded into the empire. Not a people made subjects. Slaves, then, at best. And more likely, the culling that Kit had feared. The man did pick the worst times to be right.
The new protector—an improbably mustached Firstblood named Fallon Broot—had set a curfew for all Timzinae in the city. No one on the streets from dusk to dawn. Marcus had seen a fisherman at the piers shouting that the catch would be gone before he was on the water. The new Antean portmaster had him whipped in the street until there were bright tracks of raw meat along the chitined back. A dozen soldiers watched, laughing.
All of it put Marcus in an odd place. Like the Anteans, he was Firstblood. Like them, he was an unfamiliar face in the city. He could walk the darkened streets that the citizens no longer could. And more than that, he could pass unremarked by the new masters of Suddapal because he looked like them. Even Enen and Yardem, not technically bound by the curfew, would be noticed for their race. Marcus looked like what he was, a Firstblood soldier out of uniform and a little long in the tooth. He looked like nobody. He could ferry messages between the elements of Magistra Isadau’s shadow company with less danger than anyone else in the branch.
Or at least less danger from the invaders.
“Isadau sent me,” Marcus said, his hands at his shoulders, palms out. The blade pressed against his throat.
“The hell she did,” the Timzinae man holding it said.
“My name is Marcus Wester. I’m guard captain for the Porte Oliva branch.” It might not be true, but going into the complexities of his employment seemed like a poor decision. “I came here with Magistra bel Sarcour.”
“Prove it.”
“You have seven children hidden in the attic right now. You sent the message this afternoon as a letter asking about a loan for a new millstone.”
The blade came tighter, drawing a trickle of blood. The compound around him was less than a fifth of the bank’s size. Hardly bigger than a Northcoast farmhouse. They were in the dining room, the remnants of the night’s meal still on wooden plates. In addition to the man presently in position to open his throat, there were four by the benches with knives. This, Marcus thought, would be a profoundly stupid way to die.
“System could have broken,” the man behind him hissed. “Been intercepted. How do I know you’re not one of them?”
“Because I don’t have fifty Antean soldiers outside throwing lit torches through the windows and putting arrows in anyone who runs out,” Marcus said. “Why would they bother trying to trick you?”
There was a long pause. The blade went away, and Marcus put his hand to his neck. The cut wasn’t much worse than he’d do to himself shaving, but it was embarrassing to have been overcome. His reflexes were getting slower. He wondered if it was another effect of the poisoned sword he’d left with Yardem and Kit or just the creeping in of age.
“Sorry,” the man said, wiping his blade clean of Marcus’s blood. “Can’t be too careful.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Marcus said. “I have a message from the magistra. There’s a ship going out to Pût tomorrow just before noon. Captain’s name is Brust. His ship’s got a double hull.”
“A fucking smuggler, then,” one of the men at the table said and spat. “I hate smugglers.”
“What exactly do you think it is we’re doing?” Marcus said crossly, and a pounding came at the street door. The Timzinae froze.
“In the name of the Protector, open the door!” a voice called. The accent was Antean. The man who’d been ready to kill Marcus moments before pushed him back into a pantry closet.
“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t make a damned sound or you’ll get us all killed.”
Marcus nodded and pulled the door almost shut. Through the slit he left himself, he could hear the doors open and the Anteans pushing in. The voices were harsh, pressing in over each other. Marcus wondered if the children hiding above him could hear it all too.
“We had a report. Someone came here in violation of the curfew,” a new voice said, and Marcus felt his blood go cold. He peeked out. The man wore no armor, but brown robes. His wiry hair was pulled back and his long face could have been Kit’s twenty years ago. One of the priests. The man with the blade drew in his breath to lie and doom them all and Marcus stepped out of the closet.
“That was likely me,” he said.
“And who are you?” the priest said. There were four more Antean blades behind him, and God knew how many waiting in the street.
“Marcus Wester. I work for the Medean bank.”
The priest’s eyes narrowed as he consulted the spiders in his blood. Marcus’s flesh crawled a little, just thinking about it. Behind him two of the Firstblood men exchanged a glance. Nice to have the name recognized.
“What are you doing?” the blade man said.
“Telling the truth,” Marcus said, and stopped himself before he went on with, We have nothing to hide. Because of course they did.
“Why are you here?” the priest asked.
“Business. The magistra had a note this afternoon about a loan for a new millstone. She wanted me to follow up on it since she can’t. Curfew and all.”
“A millstone? Was there nothing else?”
No would be a lie. Marcus smiled and shrugged, his br
ain casting about wildly.
“I can get you the note, if you’d like,” he said. And then, “You won’t find anything else in it.”
“And yet when you heard us, you hid in a closet? Why was that?”
“I’ve been in occupied cities before, and they can be intimidating. I got scared, and I didn’t think it through.”
The priest cocked his head, nodded. “Thank you. It seems there’s no violation here.”
“You shouldn’t be doing business with bugs,” one of the swordsmen said. “What kind of merchant works with these?”
“Bankers can be surprisingly flexible where there’s money involved,” Marcus said. “But I’ll tell them what you said.”
It was over, but there was still a chance it could go the other way. If the Anteans still thought of themselves as coming to enforce the curfew, they’d go now. If not, there was still plenty of chance for a bloodbath. But with him and the five Timzinae, the odds were good that at least one of the Anteans wouldn’t walk out. Apparently the swordsmen came to the same conclusion.
“Next time, you open the door faster,” he said, pointing his blade at one of the Timzinae who hadn’t actually opened the door at all, “or there’ll be trouble. You understand me?”
“I do,” the Timzinae man said, and the Anteans withdrew, scowling as they went.
When the door was shut, Marcus sagged down onto a bench. The sense of narrowly avoiding death left him slightly nauseated. There was a time when things like that had felt exciting, but he’d been a younger man.
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