worth all of our lives.”
“How many men can you bring?” Dawson asked.
“Twenty that I trust utterly for the event itself. A hundred once the die is cast.”
Shoat promised seven, Cersillian and Mastellin ten each, and then the full resources of their houses, for another seventy men.
“I can give twelve for the first attack,” Klin said. “Including myself. But only if we’re agreed that Palliako dies.”
Dawson looked around the ruined space and nodded.
“In three days, Palliako will be staging a revel in my name,” Dawson said. “Celebrating the capture of Asteril-hold. I don’t know this, but I suspect that he means to execute King Lechan at that time. The men can gather at my house. If they arrive in my livery and announce themselves as my honor guard, they can come into the grand hall during the feast. We end Palliako where he sits.”
“I don’t want to start a civil war,” Mastellin said.
“We won’t,” Dawson said. “Once the deed’s done we will all surrender ourselves to Prince Aster. We must not allow any question that we have done this in service to the crown.”
“That relies a great deal on a very young boy’s judgment,” Shoat said. “If he decides to call retribution, we’ll all find ourselves in a small place.”
“If you were planning to avoid risk, you’ve come to the wrong table,” Dawson said. “And if we all die in the effort, it will be a small price against the reclamation of the throne. We kill the traitor and support the king. There is no other path.”
“Agreed,” Bannien said, slapping his palm against the stone. “But killing Palliako’s only striking the sword arm. There is another issue.”
“Of course,” Dawson said. “The priests. They must be rounded up and killed. And the temple will burn.”
Cithrin
Cithrin had never been so far north in her life. Many of the small details, she knew from the stories and descriptions that Magister Imaniel had given her, but the images she’d built from the words didn’t often match the reality. She knew that the northern coasts were dotted with stone fisher-men’s huts, but in her mind they had been square, solid buildings, like the ones in Vanai only grown small. The mossy, earthen lumps strewn over the grey- green shores looked less like buildings than something that had grown up out of the land itself. She knew to expect the great, soaring lizards that lived on the stone islands and ate fish, but she had imagined them as small dragons instead of the awkward, batlike things they were. And then there were other things, unexpected and strangely wonderful. The days were even longer here, the sun hardly seeming to give over to night before the dawn began to threaten. The winters would reverse that, with the darkness and the cold swelling up to take back their due. And once the sea voyage was done, and their boat safely in its dock at Estinport, Cithrin stepped onto the earth of Imperial Antea.
She had rarely thought of land having its own personality, but as they made their way to great Camnipol, she saw the differences in the world. All her life had been spent near the shores of the Inner Sea. She had traveled through mountains and across the hills to the east of Porte Oliva. She had seen the forests north of the Free Cities. But for most part, those lands had been one thing or else another. Here, everything mixed, hard stone beside rich green meadow beside thick trees. Rich farmland lined the roads, the long, thin fields marked by fences built of rough black stone. The mountains here curved softly toward the sky, like a hill that had been left to rise too long before it was baked. Compared to the Free Cities or even Birancour, Antea seemed sure of itself. Old and staid and eternal. It was the most beautiful landscape she had ever seen, and she wanted to love it. But she didn’t.
Camnipol rose on the southern horizon, still three days away. Coming from the north, it looked like a shallow hill, spiked and gnarled with bare trees and brush. Smoke rose from it like the fires of a massive army. She knew that the city was reputed to be beautiful, and perhaps as she grew closer it would become so. From here, it was not.
“You notice the way the group splits?” Paerin Clark asked her, breaking her chain of thought.
They were sitting near the cookfire. It was too warm to need the flames for warmth, but the cheerfulness of the light and the routines of long habit brought them there. She followed his gaze to another fire on the far side of the road. A bright silk tent glowed from within. Of the two dozen men and women put together by King Tracian and Komme Medean to take the pulses of Imperial Antea, only five were noblemen, and they kept to themselves. Canl Daskellin, who had broken bread with his fingers at Komme Medean’s table, was among them.
“Highborn on one side, merchant class on the other,” Cithrin said.
“It always goes like that,” the man said. He handed her a bowl. Black beans shining bright as insects and covered with a grey sauce that looked terrible and tasted like the finest cook in Birancour had made it fresh. “Do you ever wonder why that is?”
“No, I don’t,” Cithrin said. “It’s because we all know that the idea of noble blood is a sham.”
Across the fire from them, one of the other merchants chuckled. Cithrin felt a blush rising in her cheeks, but Paerin took a mouthful of his own meal and nodded her on.
“You only have to enforce boundaries where they’re being imposed,” she said. “Think about the races. It’s been hundreds, maybe thousands of generations since the dragons made the last of us. In all that time, you would think all of the thirteen races would have blended into one, but they haven’t. We’re all more or less what we would have been if the Dragon Emperor were still in the sky. There are real barriers between Jasuru and Yemmu and Cinnae. They don’t need to be enforced. They just are.”
“To clarify, though. You’re between races.”
“And has that made Cinnae and Firstblood one thing? No. But nobility? People have become knights and earls and counts through force of arms or by buying their way in. And even the highest families have a few unwelcome members living among the poor and despised. The dirty secret of nobility is that it’s another way of saying power. We may tell other stories, but when we do, it’s because we’re building fences where there aren’t any.”
“And why would that make them sit there and us here?” Paerin said.
“Because otherwise we couldn’t tell who had the greater value. Say I have ten coins that all look the same, only some will buy five bolts of cloth, but the others are worth just one. Can you picture that?”
“But all the coins look the same,” Paerin said.
The other conversations around the fire had stopped. They were listening to her. She reached for the skin of watered wine and drank a mouthful before she went on.
“Yes. So it’s in your interest not to confuse them, isn’t it? You put one set in a tent over there, and the rest by a fire over here. Because if you put them all in the same purse, you wouldn’t know if you’d drawn a coin worth five bolts or only one. We are those coins. You and I and Komme and everyone here. We’re worth one. They over there are worth five. But if you mixed us all together, you wouldn’t see a difference. That’s why everyone hates bankers so much.”
“I think we respect noble blood,” Paerin said.
“We don’t because we lend at interest. A wise loan can make a poor man rich. A unwise one can unmake the powerful. We’re the ones who can move the coins from one side to the other, and we take our living from doing it. We’re agents of change, and the people with the most to lose are right to fear us.”
Paerin Clark looked across the fire at the man sitting there. The other man nodded, and Cithrin felt a pang of self-consciousness.
“You, Magistra, have a fascinating way of seeing things,” Paerin said, leaning back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No. Be proud of it. It’s why Komme sent you.”
The walls of Camnipol were so thick that the tunnel from one side to the other needed lanterns in the middle. The streets within were packed as tightly with bodies and carts as the narrowest alleys of Porte Oliva. Cithrin stayed close to Paerin Clark and kept one hand on her purse. She hadn’t come all this way to let a roadside pickpocket embarrass her now. The knot in her gut had been for the most part absent during her travels. It came
