his palm over its mouth and pressed it back down to the table.
“Asked you a question.”
Yardem let go of the beer.
“After Ellis, sir, you looked for revenge.”
“I looked for justice.”
“If you say so,” Yardem said, refusing to be turned. “I was with you for that. Not like we are now, but I was there. I saw it happen. You didn’t only kill Springmere. You planned it, you built it. You made sure that he could see his death coming, understood it, and couldn’t do anything to stop it. And when he was dead, you thought it would be better. Not fixed. You’re not stupid, but you thought that…
“I am just certain you have an argument in this somewhere,” Marcus said. “Because I just know you aren’t hauling Alys and Merian out of their graves to score cheap points.”
“I’m not, sir,” Yardem said. There was nothing like apology in his voice. “I’m saying you didn’t only kill Springmere because he needed to die. You were looking for redemption.”
“More of your religious—”
“And you were looking to Cithrin for the same,” Yardem said, refusing to be silenced. “She was a girl and she was at the mercy of a merciless world. We helped her. Hatred didn’t bring you peace, and somewhere in your soul, you thought that love would. And here we are, Cithrin bel Sarcour saved, only you still don’t have the redemption you wanted. So you’re trying to tell yourself and everyone else that she still needs saving when she doesn’t. She’s fine, sir.”
“I didn’t want to work for her,” Marcus said. “I wanted to walk away. You were the one who argued that we should go back. That was you.”
“It was. But that was when she needed us.”
“The way she doesn’t need us now?”
“Yes, sir. The way she doesn’t now,” Yardem said, his voice going soft and gentle in a way that was worse than shouting. “We have steady work for fair pay. We have shelter and we have food. Interesting if that’s not what we were looking for.”
“We spend our days taking people’s houses and throwing them out in the street. How’s that a way to live?”
“Used to be, we’d kill them, sir,” Yardem said. “Not sure this is worse.”
Marcus rose to his feet. The drumbeats throbbing out from the yard reached their crisis and collapsed. In the silence, Marcus’s voice was louder than he’d meant it to be.
“You can pay for your own damn drinks.”
“Yes, sir.”
The other men and women in the taproom cleared space as he stalked out, eyes both wide and averted. If any of them had spoken to him, there would have been blows over it, but no one did. In the street, the evening sun was turning the high clouds to red and gold—blood and coins. The sky behind them seemed bluer by comparison. Marcus took himself back north, toward the Grand Market and the cafe, the barracks and the counting house. The puppeteers haunted the street corners, calling to the crowds for attention and coppers. When his anger had cooled from white to a dull and aching redness, Marcus stopped for a few minutes by one. It was a simple retelling of the usual PennyPenny the Jasuru. The main puppet was nicely made, painted to give the impression of scales, and used convincingly enough that the puppet seemed to have emotions of its own. Not that PennyPenny required much more than surprise, rage, and remorse. When the hero threw his wife and baby down a well, Marcus tossed a copper into the collecting bag and walked on.
Everything came back to that. Blood and death and the impotence of violence. In the PennyPenny shows, the wife and child would return transformed into agents of retribution, but even then, the answer was only the torture and death of the Jasuru. There was no reconciliation. No chance for time to move backward and the things that were lost to be recovered. That was the story Marcus wanted to see. Except that even if he did, he wouldn’t be convinced by it.
From spite as much as anything, he revisited his plan. A good horse and enough coin for fair exchange on the road would get him to Carse. He could take a room or light work in the Firstblood’s quarter without anyone particularly taking note of him. Probably. The Medean bank wouldn’t be difficult to find, and then he could find a place to sit and play the beggar until Cithrin went in or out, and then…
He paused at the mouth of an alley and spat into the shadows. It had all seemed plausible that morning.
The squat little building across from the gymnasium hadn’t been built as a barracks, but now it was. The marks of its other lives were still on it: the patched holes where some great mechanism had been mounted to the walls, then taken out and the walls patched with stone of a different color. The easternmost roof beam blackened by some ancient fire. A series of notches chiseled into stone to mark the growth, year by year, of some long- forgotten child. Perhaps it had been a school or the sort of overcrowded house where ten different families lived all within each other’s lives. In winter, the heat came from a bric-kmaker’s stove so old that the ironwork was worn almost as thin as cloth.
The men and women within were his company. The private guard of the Medean bank. In practice, there were few of them there except late at night when they would come in from work or leisure, string hammocks or unfurl bedrolls, and sleep together out of wind and weather. Now there was only Roach, the brown-chitined Timzinae boy whose true name no one used. And less a boy than he’d been when Marcus hired him.
“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.”
