magnificent in its way.
“Your time now, kitty,” he said under his breath. “My time later.”
He patted the beast’s shoulder like it was an opponent he’d bested in the gymnasium’s fighting pit, then started to stand. He stopped. The ground near the great black claws had been churned up, black earth and pale roots. Marcus dug his fingers down, pulling up the fabric of plant and soil. The stone beneath it was a perfect green. Only it wasn’t stone.
“Kit?”
“Marcus?”
“There’s dragon’s jade here.”
Kit hobbled forward, leaning against his staff. His face was grimy and streaked with his own blood, but his eyes were bright.
“Where?”
Marcus stood up and stepped back, pointing to the turned earth. As Kit knelt down to examine it, Marcus walked up and down the clearing, squinting in concentration. All around them, great trees towered up, fighting each other to reach the sunlight. But here in this strip, the trees were thinner, shorter, weaker. The roots that fed them, perhaps shallower. Yes, now that he knew to look for it, it was clear.
“This is a road,” he said. “There’s a dragon’s road running through this valley. North to south, and maybe turning a little to the east just here.”
“Well, now,” Kit said. “There’s a pleasant surprise.”
“Did we expect to find a dragon’s road?”
“We did not.”
“And if there’s dragon’s road, it seems likely that at some point way back when there were still dragons to make the jade, it was a road
“That would seem to follow.”
Marcus felt a smile plucking at his lips.
“This is the path to your mysterious reliquary, isn’t it?”
Kit hauled himself up.
“I suppose it could be.”
For a long moment, the two men stood in the cloud of flies that buzzed around the corpse, grinning at each other like boys.
Cithrin
Magistra Isadau’s office was near the center of the compound. It was as understated as Cithrin’s back room in the cafe had been, but like a stone set in tin or else silver, the surroundings changed the nature of the space. Where Cithrin’s workplace was clearly built on business, Isadau drew anyone coming on bank business through her house. After meeting with Cithrin in Porte Oliva, a person would step out to see the Grand Market with its queensmen and merchants, traders and cutpurses, shouts and laughter and commerce. Leaving Isadau’s meant passing through not only the magistra’s home, but her brother’s, her sister’s, her mother’s. Isadau’s nieces and nephews wandered the wide hallways with their friends or else their tutors. Mother Kicha had visitors every day, so that even in the afternoons, the broad hall outside the matriarch’s bedchamber might be half full of poets or priests or sour-faced Timzinae women embroidering flowers and sunbursts onto dresses and pointedly ignoring Cithrin.
Jurin—the brother—was a farrier, and the stables were his as much as Isadau’s. Kani, who had met Cithrin at the docks, did scribe work for the bank and deliveries for Jurin and errands for her mother without drawing any distinction between them. Yardem and Enen and Roach were expected to work with Isadau’s own guardsmen, sharing the duties of the watch and escorting payments through the city, and they were also guests welcome at the family dinner table. The kitchens smelled of fennel and cumin and cinnamon, and they fed anyone who came. The cook who oversaw them, an old Yemmu man with a black crack running jaggedly through his left tusk, made a great noise and wailing about being interrupted and then kept whoever had come in conversation harder to escape than a honey trap.
There was no tradition of wayhouses in Suddapal. Travelers negotiated hospitality with whatever family opened their doors to the knock. Coming out of her room in the morning was like stepping into the street had been in Porte Oliva. Anyone might be there on any business. And Magistra Isadau’s complex—while larger and better appointed than most—was only one of hundreds that made up the five cities. In the first days, Cithrin could feel her own mind shifting, struggling to put the culture of Elassae into terms of her old experience. The compounds were like villages of a single family, each in competition with the ones around it. Or the compounds were like homes shared through a greater family and in service to all the endeavors the men and women of that family fell into. Or they were like the holdings of the nobility, except without the base of taxation and tribute to hold them up. It was only very slowly and with almost as many steps back as forward that Cithrin came to accept the compound for what it was, and even then it felt profoundly foreign. Nor was its openness the only difference.
“Hold your shoes, ma’am?” Yardem asked.
Tenthday was a moving ceremony, falling on each of the traditional seven weekdays with a mathematical certainty that was like music. Callers marched out from the basilica at dawn, ringing bronze bells and singing the call to prayer. The pious like Mother Kicha and Jurin, and those who wished to be thought well of by the pious, like Isadau and Cithrin, all met the callers barefoot in the streets and joined the procession.
“Thank you,” Cithrin said, handing the leather slippers to Yardem. “This will be more pleasant in the summer when the paving feels less like ice.”
The Tralgu’s wide, canine mouth took on a gentle smile.
“Imagine it will,” he said. His own wide leather boots hung in his hand. Roach stood beside him, his race making him seem more a part of the household than of Cithrin’s guard. Enen was staying behind; there was a whole genre of jokes about what people found at home after the ceremony. Leaving some family behind was considered an acceptable compromise between the worship of God and the nature of humanity. The callers came, bells breaking like waves against the low bass chanting of voices. Cithrin sighed, stood the way Master Kit and Cary had taught her, and joined the household as they stepped into the street. The steady pace allowed even the oldest among them to keep up, and Cithrin let her mind wander as they passed through the wide streets of Suddapal. The group was mostly Timzinae, but the massive bodies of Yemmu lumbered among them, as well as the tall and tall- eared Tralgu. Cithrin was the only Cinnae or Firstblood; her pale skin and hair stood out like a star in the night sky, and she caught more than a few people craning their necks for a glimpse of the newcomer. She tried not to feel awkward about it.
The city here sloped down to the south. The sea was a greater whiteness behind sun-glowing mist. The sky was pale as opal.
Magistra Isadau appeared at her side, and Cithrin nodded formally. Some swift calculation seemed to pass behind the older woman’s eyes before she returned the gesture.
“You’re looking well this morning, Cithrin.”
“Thank you,” Cithrin said over the chant and the bells.
“I saw that you’d begun your review of the books?”
“I have,” Cithrin said, then looked around her. They were where the private business of the bank would be overheard if spoken of, and yet the magistra’s comment felt like an invitation. Cithrin felt a tightening in her gut, like a rat smelling a dog, but not sure yet which direction held the danger. “I’ll want to look over them more this afternoon.”
“I suspect we can make time for it,” Isadau said. “There are some people I would like you to meet after the ceremony.”
Cithrin smiled carefully.
“Whatever you think wise,” she said, keeping her tone cheerful.
“Ati Isadau!” a voice called from behind them. A younger Timzinae boy—thirteen summers or possibly a bit
