“All well, Captain?”
“Apart from it being a corrupt and fallen world,” Marcus said, and the boy laughed as if it were a joke. Marcus shouldered his bedroll and climbed to the roof. A pigeon startled when he pushed open the trap, flailing at the air in panic. Marcus unrolled his bed, and then lay back and watched the clouds grey and the sky darken. Voices came from the street and from the barracks beneath him. His mind kept returning to Alys and Merian. The family he’d had, back when he’d been the kind of man who could have a family. Alys’s dark hair with its threadings of grey. Merian’s long face, slightly indignant from the moment she’d left her mother’s womb. He could still hear his little girl laughing in her crib, could still recall pressing his lips to his wife’s neck just where it turned to shoulder. The brilliant young general, champion and Lord Marshal of the rightful heir, Lian Springmere. He’d been going to remake the world, back then.
It was more than a decade now since Alys and Merian stopped feeling all pain. Some days he could barely remember their faces. Some days, he had the physical certainty that they were in the room with him, invisible and sorrowful and accusing. Grief did things to men, but knowing that didn’t help.
It was full dark when the trap opened again. Marcus knew without looking that it was Yardem. The tall Tralgu folded his legs beside Marcus’s head.
“Pyk was asking for you, sir. Wants to know why things you’ve bought are in the bank’s warehouse.”
“Because I’m guard captain for the bank.”
“She might find that more convincing from you.”
“Unless she wants to go haul it to the street herself, the reason doesn’t much matter.”
Yardem chuckled.
“What?” Marcus said.
“That was the argument I offered her too. She didn’t seem to find the prospect interesting.”
“That, old friend,” Marcus said, “is a powerfully unpleasant woman.”
“Is.”
“Still. She’s not the worst I’ve worked for.”
“Quite a bit of room in that, sir.”
“Fair point.”
The pigeon or one like it landed on the edge of the building, considering the pair with one wet, black eye and then the other.
“Well, Yardem. The day you throw me in a ditch and take over the company?”
“Sir?”
“It’s not today.”
“Good to know, sir.”
“Do you think Merian would have made a good banker?”
“Hard to say, sir. I imagine she would have if she’d decided to be.”
“I think I’m going to get some rest. Face the Pyk in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. Also?” Yardem cleared his throat, a deep and distant rumble. “If I went too far…”
“Going too far’s your job. When it’s called for, you should always go too far. Everyone else respects me too much,” Marcus said. “Well, except for Kit.”
“I’ll remember that, sir.”
Yardem rose and padded away. The moon hid behind dark clouds. The stars came out, first one, and then a handful, and then a host so large as to beggar the imagination. Marcus watched them until his mind began to slide sideways of its own accord, and he pulled his blanket around him. The smell of roasting pork flirted and vanished, borne on the fickle breeze.
When the nightmare came, as he had known it would, it was almost the same as always. The flames, the screaming, the feeling of the small body, dead in his arms. Only this time, there were three figures in the fire. He woke before he could tell if Cithrin was the third or if he was.
Cithrin
In facing her first sea voyage, Cithrin had expected many of the hardships that came with being in a ship: the nausea and the close quarters and the fear of knowing that her life depended on the ship remaining afloat without any particular control over whether it did. All had proven real, though few as unpleasant as she had anticipated they would be. The surprise was how much the enforced inactivity calmed her. At any time of day or night, she would take herself to the deck, lean against the rail, and consider the waves or the distant dark line of the coast as it slipped past. There was nothing she could do, and so there was nothing required of her. If she willed the ship on faster toward Carse or grew homesick for her little rooms above the counting house, it made no difference, and before long she found herself simply inhabiting the moment. She was one of the first to see the Drowned.
At first, it was no more than a slightly lighter tone to the blue. Then it was something under the water—a barkstripped log or some pale-fleshed fish. Then it was the body of a Firstblood man, naked, staring emptily up toward the air. A sailor called, laughter in the sound, and footsteps pattered behind her as the crew came to the rail with her. The Drowned man wasn’t alone. Cithrin saw a woman floating at his side, and then another beyond her. And then hundreds more. Between one moment and the next, the sea was full of them. The slow movements of their limbs could almost have been the water pushing them. As Cithrin watched, one rose up from the depths just under her—a young man almost a boy with the thin, coltish frame of an adolescent or a Cinnae. His dark eyes seemed to find her, and slowly, he smiled.
“Never seen the Drowned before, Magistra?” Barth asked. She hadn’t noticed him there.
“Once,” she said. “There was one in one of the canals in Vanai. But never like this.”
“Usually travel in pods a little smaller’n this. We got lucky, seeing so many at once.”
A sailor shouted and leaped, diving out into the water. With his splash, the Drowned sank at once, falling away beneath the water as fast as stones. Cithrin watched the boy beneath her vanish. In the water, the sailor laughed and tried to dive after them.
“What an ass,” Barth said with no particular heat in his voice.
“Why do they run?”
“They’re slow, they’re weak out of water, and they’re naked. Sailors and shoremen sometimes have cruel ideas of sport,” Barth said. “The Drowned are like anyone else. They see a threat, and they avoid it. Even fish do that.”
Cithrin nodded, but she also watched the sailor when his shipmates pulled him up grinning from the water, and she made a point of avoiding him for the rest of the voyage.
Carse. The white chalk cliffs began half a day before the city came into sight, rising from the seashore like a glacier. The sea itself seemed to take on a paleness, and the hazy sky was lighter than blue. The first signs of human life—or rather of the dozen races who built above that water—were the fishing ships. Small and black, they were coming back toward the cliffs now, or else making their way north toward the smaller towns nearer the water.
Despite being on the sea, Carse was not, properly speaking, a port. It sat at the end of the dragon’s roads in the north and looked down over the waves. A great network of docks encrusted the base of the cliffs, but few merchants chose to use them. Rather they would travel to where the cliffs ended and haul their goods overland to the great city. Cithrin and the other passengers, having little to carry, got off at the docks and made their way up the switchbacks that rose to Carse proper. She found it somewhat unnerving to see the other, older paths still marking the cliffs, but eroded and crumbling past usefulness. One day the white chalk that paled her shoes and dress as she staggered up the cliff, her balance not yet accustomed to the stillness of earth, would be that same impassable ruin. Only hopefully not today.
At the top of the cliffs, the trail bent east, transforming itself into broad iron stairs that led up to a great courtyard and the city itself. If it had been designed to impress someone walking up to it this way, it could hardly have been better. The council tower rose up, ten stories high, its stone as smooth as skin. The top floor sported a dozen windows on each side with colored glass in each, ready to announce the edicts and decisions of the Council of Eventide whenever it met. Even in the height of war, the tower was sacrosanct. No king or prince would cross the theologians and cunning men who made up the council, and Carse
would have been less of a jewel in any crown without it.
Beyond that, a jade dragon larger than the ship she’d sailed there in lay curled with its great snout tucked under a carved wing. Cithrin had read of the Grave of Dragons and the statue of sleeping Morade, last of the Dragon Emperors, at its mouth. Even warned, it took her breath away.
But the city hadn’t been built to be seen from the top of the cliff. It had been made to be seen from the air. Buildings had fallen and been rebuilt, what could burn, ancient armies had burned and restored and burned again, but in its heart, Carse was a city of dragons. Its streets and squares were wide to make room for great bodies that had not walked them in more than centuries. The great perches where, according to story, the dragons once met were kept clean and ready, as if someday the masters of humanity might return.
Cithrin had spent her childhood in Vanai with narrow streets and canals, her adulthood in the tight ways and white walls of Porte Oliva. Carse was huge and grey, stately and sober and dignified. The wide streets felt like a boast, the high towers rose like trees. A single man in fine chainmail, a blade at his side, walked through the street, and Cithrin realized with a start that he was part of the city guard. In Porte Oliva, the queensmen traveled in pairs at the minimum and more often groups of five or six. The prince’s guard in Vanai had worn ostentatious gilt armor and carried leaddipped clubs for beating down those who they saw fit. To have a single man with no apparent allies in sight was either high folly or the mark of a city where violence was rare. She wasn’t sure if she felt safer or more threatened.
On the street corner, a cunning man conjured flashes of lightning from the air, tiny booms of thunder accompanying him like an aggressive drum. He had no beggar’s box. Cithrin wasn’t sure if she was meant to watch him or keep moving on.
It took her an hour to find the Medean bank. The front was even more modest than her own counting house; a black door between a fish-seller’s shop and a small, disreputable temple. Only the symbol of the bank and a wooden sign in the shape of a coin marked it. She motioned to her guards that they should stay in the street. Anxiety snaked through her belly and exhaustion plucked at the muscles of her legs and back. The calm of watching the Thin Sea was like a dream half recalled.
She stood before the door, breathing deeply. In her memory, Master Kit reminded her to hold her weight low in her hips and walk with her chin higher. She remembered his voice saying, You can do this.
She could, but she didn’t have to. No one was expecting her. She could have Barth or Corisen Mout take the books in, and they could go back home without ever imposing on Komme Medean or anyone else. If she didn’t go in, they couldn’t turn her away or belittle her. As long as she didn’t try, she wouldn’t fail.
She pushed the door open and walked through.
Within, the counting house was less gloomy than she’d expected, lit by clerestory windows and filled with potted ivies and violets on the edge of bloom. A man about Marcus Wester’s age—beginning to thicken and grey, but not yet old—with skin the color of polished mahogany leaned out of a door she hadn’t seen.
“Help you?” he asked.
Cithrin held up the books as if they were a ward against evil.
“I’ve brought the reports from Porte Oliva,” she said. Her voice was tight and high. She gave thanks she hadn’t squeaked.
“Ah, you’ll want the holding company. It’s three streets north and one west. Use the gate on the west side.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then, “Are you Magister Nison, then?”
A degree of interest came into the man’s expression.
“I am.”
“Magister Imaniel used to talk about you,” she said, forcing herself to smile.
It wasn’t truth. She’d taken his name from the papers and books that had come with her from Vanai. But Magister Imaniel was dead. Cam was dead. All the people who could say otherwise were gone from the world, and so the truth could be whatever she wanted it to be. And right now, she wanted it to be that she and this stranger shared a connection, however slight.
In less than a heartbeat confusion gave way to surprise, and surprise to amusement.
“You’re bel Sarcour, then,” Nison said. “Wait just a moment.”
He vanished again, and she heard his voice calling for someone, and another man’s voice calling back. The accent of Carse was fast and clipped, and the only words she could make out were old man and tomorrow. Not the most informative.
He stepped back into sight wearing a cloak of undyed wool and a smile that didn’t seem entirely benign.
“Let me escort you, Magistra,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
If the counting house had been modest, the holding company more than made up for it. Five stories high, it looked less like a building within a city than a fortified keep of its own. The unglazed windows were thin as arrow-slits and the roof had decorative stonework that could easily act as ramparts. Nison guided her through an iron gate and into a courtyard like a palace’s. A fountain chuckled and burbled, and incense wafted from windows covered by intricate carved shutters. Servants or slaves had washed the paving stones until there seemed to be neither dirt nor dust anywhere in the yard. He led her into a wide, airy chamber of brick and tapestry and from there up a stairway that curved with the wall to a doorway of oak inlaid with ivory and jet.
It made sense that the holding company would have greater wealth than any of the branches. It was, after all, the reason to have a holding company rather than simply a central branch of the bank. The profits and losses from any individual branch—her own, Magister Nison’s, or any of the others—were specific to that branch. They rose or fell on their merits, and all of them paid into a separate business that was the holding company, which gave out no loans and accepted no deposits, but rather mediated the flow of gold between the branches. No one outside the bank held a contract with the holding company or Komme Medean. If Cithrin gave out too many insurance contracts before a war or a bad storm season, she could bankrupt her branch, but her debt ended with her. No one could make claim from this building or from any other branch. In fact, depending on the situation, the holding company might be among the creditors she would suffer to repay.
It seemed little more than a told story, but it was a fiction that made this house a port of safety for wealth and her own an engine of risk. She knew all this and understood it as she knew her numbers and letters. Only she had never before seen it in practice. Silently, she began to recalculate her branch and its worth in terms of the doors and fountains, tapestry and incense. Her head swam a little.
The woman who opened the door to Magister Nison’s rapping was dressed in a dark robe of fine cotton and had her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Cithrin smiled and nodded, totally unsure whether she was seeing a woman of the highest status or a well-dressed servant and trying to land somewhere that would offend neither one. At her side, Magister Nison nodded his head in her direction.
“Magistra bel Sarcour just in from Porte Oliva. She’s brought the reports. I thought Komme might like to meet the girl with the biggest balls in Birancour.”
“Actually, I’m from the Free Cities,” Cithrin said. “Originally.”
It was idiotic, but the words spilled out of her mouth as if she’d planned them. The dark-robed woman lifted an eyebrow.
“He’s a bit under the weather,” the woman said. “It’s a bad day.”
“I can come back another time,” Cithrin said, already half turned away.
“Who’s come?” a man’s voice called. “Who is it?”
The woman put a hand on Cithrin’s wrist like holding a dog’s ear to keep it from straying, then leaned back and spoke loudly.
“Magister Nison and Magistra bel Sarcour.”
“And you’re going to keep ’em standing there?”
The woman and Nison exchanged a shrug, and she stepped back, motioning them into the private rooms. The floors were golden-brown wood of a k
ind Cithrin had never seen before lacquered until it shone like wet stone. Sconces of gold and silver hung from the walls, the polished metal throwing back the light of small, delicate candles. A tapestry hung on the wall unmistakably showing the building that they were presently in, but in colors so bright and vibrant that Cithrin couldn’t begin to imagine what dyes could have done it; it was like looking at the iridescent wing of a butterfly. She wished that she’d stopped to buy some grander dress before she came. Or at least cleaner sandals.
The room they entered was open on one side to a balcony that looked down into the courtyard. The branches of a tree shifted in their spring green, the new leaves catching the sun and glittering like water or coins. Komme Medean lay in the center of the room, reclining on a seat woven from leather straps. Apart from a loincloth, he was naked, his brown skin powdered almost white. His belly was the solid fat of middle age, and a fringe of white hair clung to his scalp. He reminded Cithrin of a lump of bread dough coated with flour and left to rise.
His right leg was bent and of normal human proportion, but his left stood straight out, held in its own sling. The knee and ankle were massive, misshapen, and angry. A young Timzinae in the robes of a cunning man was crouched beside the diseased limb, chanting under his breath. Cithrin had never seen a man with gout before, and while she’d known it was an unpleasant ailment, she hadn’t understood the degree. She forced herself not to stare. Something in the cunning man’s fingers clicked, and he grunted as if in pain. Komme Medean ignored him. Pale brown eyes swept up and down her, evaluating her not the way a man would a woman, but as a carpenter might a plank of lumber.
“I’ve brought the reports from Porte Oliva,” Cithrin said.
“All right. What do you want?” Komme Medean said. And when she didn’t answer immediately, “You carried your reports yourself instead of sending a courier. You came here yourself. You want something. What is it?”
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