“All this,” she said, gesturing at the empty tombs and the death prints, “has been here, right here, since before the beginning. People have been cleaning and neglecting and cleaning these graves almost since before there were people. And that doesn’t move you?”
“Maybe it should,” Lauro said, shrugging. “But no. It’s just the Grave. It’s this amazing thing to people who don’t know it, but it’s no more impressive to me than the sea or the sky or the cliffs, and I see all of them every day.”
“Hmm,” Cithrin said.
“What?”
“I work with Marcus Wester,” she said. “I think that knowing him is a bit like that too.”
The two great surprises of the holding company were first that Paerin Clark, the auditor she had extorted into letting her keep a place in Porte Oliva, was also living at the holding company’s unofficial holdfast inside the city. The second was that he was pleased to see her.
Coming back through the bronze gates now, Lauro called out to the pale man sitting on a bench. Paerin Clark waved to them, paused, and then waved them over. As they drew near him, Lauro tried to take Cithrin’s hand and made do with putting his arm around her shoulder.
“Brother,” Paerin Clark said. Technically it was true, as Paerin was married to Lauro’s sister, but Cithrin couldn’t really imagine the two being part of the same family. “What have you two been doing?”
“I took Cithrin to the Grave of Dragons,” Lauro said. “She’d never seen it.”
“And did you enjoy it, Magistra?”
“I did, and thank you,” Cithrin said. She could feel a small discomfort in the way Lauro held himself beside her, thrown off by the easy formality of her talk with Paerin. And there was the smallest spark of amusement in the older man’s eyes. If Lauro wanted to play at familiarity with her, she would play at being an adult with Paerin and throw the young boy off his stride. Comfort was never the fate of an obstacle.
“I was wondering if I might borrow the magistra’s company for a few minutes. Something’s come up I wanted to discuss with her. Bank business.”
“Of course,” Lauro said, a little coolly. He took his arm from around Cithrin’s shoulder and bowed to her. “Thank you for the pleasure of your company.”
“No, thank you, Lauro,” she said.
She sat on the bench at Paerin Clark’s side and watched as the son of Komme Medean walked away through the courtyard. Clark, she noted, shifted over slightly to be sure that the two of them were not touching.
“May I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course.”
“What are you hoping to win here?”
Cithrin glanced at him sharply, but his face was as blank and pleasant as always. In all her life, Cithrin had never known anyone better at not giving information away. As good, but not better.
“I thought I’d made that clear,” she said, trying for the brash half-humor she used with Komme Medean.
“No,” Paerin said, and there was no lightness in his voice. “What you’ve said is what you want. What I’m asking is why you want it. What are your ambitions?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand the question. I want to run my bank.”
“Yes, but why is that what you want?”
“Because it’s mine,” she said.
Paerin took a deep breath and shifted on the bench so that he was half facing her. The tree above him cast shadows across his face, and for a moment he reminded her of children’s pictures of forest ghosts.
“Do you want to be rich?” he asked.
“I suppose,” she said.
“Then that isn’t the answer. Do you want power?”
“I want the power that belongs to me,” she said. “I want what I’ve earned.”
“Even if you’ve earned it through forgery and fraud?”
“I haven’t harmed anyone,” Cithrin said, crossing her arms. “What I’ve done was good business. I kept my contracts. They’re only not legal because I’m too young.”
“Not for much longer, though,” Paerin said, more than half to himself. He tapped his fingers against his knee, frowning. “Are you aware that Komme’s been shoving Lauro at you to find out if you’re fishing for a husband?”
“He could have asked. I’m not. I don’t want someone to run my bank for me. If I did, I’d marry Pyk Usterhall and be done.”
Paerin laughed.
“There’s an image. All right. There’s something I’d like you to do tonight,” he said. “Not a feast, just a meal. But the man who’s coming is important.”
“All right,” she said. “Why do you want me there?”
On the street, a horse neighed and a carter shouted. The breeze shifted the shadows across the pale man’s face. She waited while he weighed his answer.
“I recall being your age,” he said, portioning out each word, “and I remember what it was like to look for something without knowing what it was. You have one of the best minds for coin and the powers of coin that I’ve ever seen, but you lack experience. That’s not a criticism, it’s only true. And there’s a negotiation happening tonight. I would like you to be there. See how the game is played.”
Cithrin turned this over in her mind. Her heart was beating a little faster, and she felt the flush in her cheeks. This might be the opportunity she’d come all this way to find.
“May I ask you a question?” she said.
“That seems fair.”
“Why is that what you want?”
He nodded. Almost a minute passed.
“You’re young. You’re still making yourself into the woman you’re going to be, looking for the project that your life will become. People sometimes need help to find that. I am older, and in a position of some power, and I think you may become the sort of person I would like to owe me favors later on.”
The smile forced its way to Cithrin’s lips. It felt like victory.
“And here I thought it was altruism,” she said.
“Oh, Magistra.” Paerin Clark smiled. “We don’t do that here.”
The meal began just before sundown around a table of wooden planks no grander than a laborer might sit at. Platters filled the space between: clams in garlic sauce, pasta and cream, bottles of wine, loaves of fresh-baked bread. Komme Medean sat at one end, the swelling in his ankle and knee gone down enough that they looked almost normal. Cithrin and Lauro sat along one side across from Paerin Clark and his wife, Chana, who looked even more like her father than Lauro did. At the other end of the table, the Antean nobleman with skin as dark as coffee. Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch and Protector of Northport and the Regent’s Special Ambassador to Northcoast, grinned and broke bread with his hands.
“Think how I feel,” Daskellin said. “I’m sent on a fast boat with desperate pleas for King Tracian to help us in the war, and by the time I get here, we’ve all but won. It doesn’t make me look smarter, let’s say.”
Komme Medean chortled and nodded.
“I know just how you feel,” he said. “I was trying to win a concession in a sugar plantation on an island off Elassae. Year and a half of negotiation, and I was just sending back the final contracts to their council when the whole damn thing burned flat. Wound up with a concession on a salt cinder in the Inner Sea. Thank God I hadn’t paid for it yet.”
“I remember that,” Cithrin said.
“Do you now?” Komme said.
Canl Daskellin’s gaze turned to her, and she realized how thin the ice was she’d just put herself on. If it came out she’d been living at the Vanai branch, it might come out why. If anyone looked into her age, there could be a great deal at stake.
“Heard about it from Magister Imaniel,” she said without missing a beat. “It was done out of the Vanai branch, wasn’t it?”
Komme Medean pursed his lips as if in thought.
