You need a bath,” Sandr said, prodding Charlit Soon with his toe. And then a moment later, “
“I think we can say we’d all do well with baths,” Cary said. “And fresh food. And maybe a rainstorm.”
Cithrin squatted on the back of the cart, a bowl of stewed barley in her hand. She hadn’t come out of the hole until just after midday, and even after the walk to Yellow House, the sun seemed too bright. Twelve days in the darkness. So far.
“Well, the good news is we found your high priest,” Cary said. “The bad is that he’s holed up in the middle of an army and won’t let anyone come near him. I thought about passing him a letter, but I wasn’t sure you’d want that.”
Cithrin frowned. The truth was, she was of two minds. Several times in the last week, she’d have offered to cut off a toe if it meant a warm bed, a good meal, and five hours in a bathhouse. When Geder and Aster emerged from the hole, there would be no reason for her to be down in it with them, and she was coming to truly loathe that place. But when the time came, Geder would become Lord Regent Palliako again. Aster would be prince and king. Everything would change.
She’d been sent here to find out what she could about Antea in the face of its war with Asterilhold. Now she was hiding with two of the most important leaders, present and future, that the kingdom would have. What she’d learned was that Geder Palliako was a funny, somewhat awkward man who loved books of improbable history. That Aster hadn’t known how to spit for distance, and now—thanks to her—he did. She saw the affection between the pair of them, and the enthusiasms. And the almost physical shared sorrow that neither one of them acknowledged, or even recognized. When they rose out of the ground, they would leave her, and her chance to learn more of them both would vanish.
“I’ll talk to Geder about it,” she said, scooping up the last of the barley with two cupped fingers. “Anything else?”
“The usual human landscape of lies and folly,” Cary said. “Did you know that Geder commands the spirits of the dead, and that at night ghosts stalk the streets rooting out his enemies?”
“He hadn’t mentioned that,” Cithrin said. “Good to know. All right, then. If that’s all—”
Mikel grinned.
“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact…”
Cithrin lifted her eyebrows.
“You always do that,” Charlit Soon said. “That’s exactly what I was talking about with A Tragedy of Tarsk. You always play the pause for effect.”
“Has an effect,” Smit said.
“Yeah,” Charlit Soon said, “it prolongs and annoys.” She tossed a pebble at Mikel.
“As a matter of fact,” Cithrin prompted.
“As a matter of fact,” Mikel said, somewhat abashed, “I found where your Paerin Clark’s been hiding. Went to ground in a guesthouse of Canl Daskellin’s, which was a pretty good idea since the inn you were staying in burned.”
“It burned?” Cithrin said.
“Fourth night after,” Cary said.
“My clothes were in there,” Cithrin said.
“Twelve people were in there,” Sandr said. “Two of them children.”
Cithrin considered Sandr. There had been a time not all that long ago when she’d very nearly taken him as a lover. From where she sat now, the wisdom of her decision not to glowed like a fire in the night.
“Yes, I am a small, petty woman,” she said, “and I mourn for the dead and the suffering, but I really wanted to get my own damn clothes back. Can you reach Paerin, or is he as guarded as the priest?”
“He’s not taking visitors he doesn’t know,” Mikel said.
“All right,” Cithrin said. “I’ll need something to write on.”
The company cipher was still clear in her mind, and the note was a brief one:
It was one of the great and powerful lessons of finance. The key to wealth and power was simple enough to state and difficult to employ: be between things. Narinisle was a chilly island with barely enough arable land to support its own population and no particular resources to offer, but the currents of the Ocean Sea put it between Far Syramys and the rest of the continent. And so it was vastly wealthy. Now Cithrin had fallen into Narinisle’s position, and while it wouldn’t last, she could gain more the longer she remained in place.
“All right,” she said, handing the paper to Mikel. “I’ll come back as soon as I can for the reply.”
“How are things going underground?” Cary asked.
“Frightened and bored and ready to be done with this. But we let Aster sneak up to the mouth and look out at the daylight. It seems to help.”
“Good. When this is over, though, I hope the Lord Regent remembers who his friends are. I’m almost through all the stones the prince brought with him.”
“Really?”
“I could buy more with a ripe orange than with one of those pearls,” Cary said. “It’s already starvation time in some quarters. If this all doesn’t break soon, we’ll start seeing a lot more people dying. And they won’t be lords and nobles falling in glorious battle.”
When there was nothing more to be said, Cithrin pulled a sack over her shoulder with four fresh wineskins, a palmsized round of hard cheese, a bottle of water, some stale bread, and a double handful of dried cherries harvested at least a year before and hard as pebbles. She paused before she started the walk back, looking out over the Division.
The air was hazy, the far side of the span already a bit greyer than things closer to hand. Nothing was burning at the moment, but there was no reason to expect that would be true through the night, for instance.
She hadn’t been there for a half a season, but Camnipol had gone from the heart of an empire to a city of scars. It was in the scorch marks on the buildings and the faces of the men she passed in the streets, the empty market squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could play the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.
On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.
At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.
The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.
“Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.
Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.
“It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”
“The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”
“Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.
“It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”
“We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to
