back now as hard as a cramp. It was like stepping into the city had stripped all her certainty from her. As if the city itself disliked her and they both knew it.
This was the heart of the empire that had changed her. An army had marched from this city. Some commander wearing Antean colors had given the order to burn Vanai, and those flames sent her skirling off on the wind like a dry leaf, every imagined life left behind. The men who had closed Vanai’s gates and set it afire lived here. They walked the streets and drank at the taprooms and might for all she knew be beside her at any moment. Magister Imaniel and Cam were dead, and their deaths began here.
She set her jaw and her resolve.
The thing she noticed first and most about Camnipol was how many Firstbloods there were. Yes, here and there she might catch a glimpse of a Tralgu wearing a slave’s collar and carrying someone else’s packages, or Jasuru litter-bearers. But of every twenty faces she saw on the streets, nineteen were Firstblood. The thing she noticed second was that many of them were drunk.
“Is it always like this?” she shouted to Paerin, two feet ahead of her.
“No,” he called back. “It’s never been like this before when I’ve been. Never seen it this happy either. Stay close. The inn’s not far.”
Cithrin clenched her teeth and pressed on. If it had been Porte Oliva, the heat of bodies and the jostling wouldn’t have been nearly as bad, only because it would have been familiar. Here, the sky was a different shade of blue and the air was thinner and everything was different.
The inn was thankfully fronting its own courtyard. No carts were trying to press their way through, no one came there who didn’t have business. Cithrin felt as if she were stumbling into it.
“Wait here,” Paerin Clark told her. He ducked into the shadows of the inn. The stone walls were like a fortification’s. Bright cloth hung from the windows and doorframes like a fine veil on an ugly girl. Someone shouted from the street, an angry buzz in the voice, and Cithrin wished that Marcus and Yardem had come with her. The journey to Carse had been one thing. It had been a move against Pyk Usterhall and the encroaching control over her bank. Coming to Camnipol had been a whim, a moment’s madness played out over weeks. She held her elbows, trying to be small.
She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help. The noise of the street was the roar of a river. Voices and iron- wheeled carts. Dogs barked, chasing rats into the shadows and then back out again. One voice was calling out an offer of apple tarts and two coppers each. Another promised a play at dusk. Another merely shouted invective and abuse.
Cithrin’s heart began to race before she knew why. The voice announcing the play. She knew it.
“Smit!” she yelled, straining to be heard. “Smit! Is that you?”
And a moment later, from very close and terribly far away, “Cithrin?”
“Smit! Over here,” she called. “I’m by the inn.”
He stepped out of the crowd like he was walking onto a stage, nowhere and then suddenly there. His eyes were wide with surprise and delight, and Cithrin ran over to him, throwing her arms about him. He whooped and lifted her in the air.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as her feet touched ground again. “I had you playing the magistra for a long run.”
“Still am,” she said, not taking her arms from around him. Of Master Kit’s players, she’d never been as close to Smit as she was to Cary or Sandr. Or Opal, though that didn’t bear thinking of. But having Smit here in the middle of the strangeness and far, far from home made her reluctant to let him go, and he didn’t object. “The holding company sent me with a few others to get the lay of the land with the new regent.”
“And the end of the war,” Smit said. “It was bad trade there for a time, but we’re swimming in coin now. You have to come see us. We’ve put together a version of the Lark’s Lament with all local references. Took us a long time to get all the names right, but now all the people we’re making fun of come every other show just to hear their names said. S’brilliant.”
“How is everyone? What’s Master Kit doing?”
Smit’s face darkened.
“Master Kit’s gone,” he said. “Gave over everything to Cary and headed out. Said something gnomic about killing gods and went like dandelion fluff in a high wind. Miss the hell out of that man.”
“I’m sorry,” Cithrin said. She couldn’t entirely imagine the acting company without Master Kit.
“We’ll do. Cary’s a damn bit harder on us, but she’s got a good eye. And the new one, Charlit Soon—d’ya know her?”
“Met her a few times,” Cithrin said, and someone bumped Smit forward into her.
“You two get some privacy!” a man’s voice shouted. “Don’t care to see you rubbing on each other!”
“Lick my ass!” Smit yelled over his shoulder. “Anyway, she’s gotten better. Really growing into the roles.”
“And Sandr?”
“Sandr’s Sandr.”
“Well. Pity, that.”
“I’ll tell him you said so,” Smit said with a grin.
“You won’t,” Cithrin said, taking her arms away for the first time and hitting him lightly on the shoulder.
“You’ll come see us, though? We’re at a taproom called Yellow House. Not the cleverest name, but it’s hard to mistake since the whole place looks like it’s painted in yolk. It’s just at the edge of the Division by the one bridge. Autumn. Autumn Bridge.”
“What’s the Division?”
“Big crack down the middle of the place. Yellow House, by Autumn Bridge. Say that?”
“Yellow House by Autumn Bridge,” she said, and he patted her on the head like a puppy.
“Know your lines already. I’d best go. Lots of players in this town. We’ll want our share of audience.”
“Tell the others I said hello,” Cithrin said. “Tell them I miss them.”
“Shall,” Smit said, and then the flow of the street took him again. She heard his voice calling the play. Faint, fainter, and gone.
When she turned, Paerin Clark was in the doorway of the inn. His expression hovered in the no-man’sland between scandalized and amused. Cithrin walked to him the way Cary had taught her, low in the hips and steady. The walk of an older woman. When Paerin spoke, his voice betrayed nothing.
“Did I just see the voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva embracing an actor in the street?”
“The voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva is a many-faceted woman,” Cithrin said. “Do we have rooms?”
“We do. I thought I would tour you through the city, if you’d care to.”
“I would be delighted,” she said, offering him her elbow. He took it with a bow.
Camnipol, now that she wasn’t quite as overwhelmed by it, was a city of grim and terrible beauty that was at present dressed in its holiday ribbons. The dark stone and grandeur of the buildings showed through once she knew to look for it.
The great chasm of the Division stood in the center of the city, the great architectural wound exposing the bones beneath the foundations of the buildings. The Silver Bridge they crossed to reach the Kingspire had no particular silver about it, but great timbers that creaked and swayed over the abyss. At the bridge’s edge, she stopped a girl and asked which was the Autumn Bridge, for later. The girl pointed south with a pitying expression as if Cithrin had asked if the sky was up or down.
The Kingspire itself was astounding. It was easily the largest tower Cithrin had ever seen, and she was willing to believe it was the largest in the world. And all around it, the mansions and estates of the high families, the tombs of the dead, the temples. She stopped before one with a massive red pennant with an eightfold sigil at its center. Paerin Clark looked up at it and then down at her, but she only shook her head—some wisp of memory come and gone without leaving its name—and they walked on.
When, near dark, they came back to the inn, Cithrin’s feet ached, but the knot in her gut was less than it had been. Not gone, but a half a skin of wine with a bit of meat would let her sleep, she thought, even in an unfamiliar bed. Paerin Clark sat with her in the cramped common room.
“It’s a lovely city,” she said. “But I can’t think you came here just to walk me around.”
“No, we only had an evening, and it seemed pleasant,” he said. “Tomorrow, the work begins. I have two
