“Yes.”
“Yes,” Marcus said. “But I think you were right. She wouldn’t have been counting on me to come save her. So at least I won’t have disappointed.”
“You sound bitter.”
“That’s because I’m a mean bitter old man. Do you see those four stars in a row? The ones right there near the horizon?”
“I do.”
“You can’t see them where I was born. Too far north. There are a lot of stars you can’t see from there.”
Kit made a small grunting sound by way of comment.
“You’ve traveled the world,” Marcus said. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Hmm. Let me see. There’s a lake in Herez. Lake Esasmadde. It’s huge. And in the center of it, there’s a whirlpool like when the last of the water is leaving a drain, but the lake never empties. And in the center of the whirlpool there’s a tower. Five stories tall, and utterly unreachable. As far as I can tell, it’s been that way since the dragons.”
“What do you think it is?”
“It could be a prison. Someplace that the dragons dropped their bad slaves. Or the last retreat of Drakkis Stormcrow. I really couldn’t say for certain. What about you? What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen in your travels?”
“Probably you.”
“Well. Fair enough.”
The harp tune changed, shifting to a soft melody that the night seemed to carry on its own.
“I think the third string’s out of tune,” Kit said.
“Only a bit,” Marcus said. “And you aren’t paying for it.”
Sleep hovered at the edge of Marcus’s mind, but never quite descended. Kit shifted in his bedroll, and a falling star flashed overhead, there and gone before Marcus could say anything.
“You know,” Kit said, very softly. “I think I could make the nightmares go away. If you wanted me, I could try.”
“And how would you do that?”
“I would tell you that it wasn’t your fault, what happened to them. I could tell you that they forgave you. Given time, you would believe me. It might afford you more peace. Some sleep.”
“If you tried, I’d have to kill you.”
“That bad?”
“That bad,” he said.
“It wouldn’t take your memory of them.”
“It would take what the memories meant,” Marcus said. “That’s worse. Besides, they’re not bothering me right now.”
“I’d noticed that,” Kit said. “I thought it was a bit odd. You’ve seemed almost content. It’s unnerving.”
“I had everything in Porte Oliva,” Marcus said. “Steady work. A company that respected and followed me. I didn’t work for a king. I had Cithrin and I had Yardem. I am, by the way, going to kill him when we’re done with this. He betrayed me, and he’ll answer for it. You can try your little magic on that if you want.”
“I believe you,” Kit said. “But you’ve lost all of that now, haven’t you?”
“I have,” Marcus said. “I’m finishing up my fourth decade in the world sleeping on dirt and grass beside a man with spiders crawling though his veins. I have to get across the Inner Sea, and I don’t know how I’m going to manage it. If I do get there, I’m not certain yet how I’ll get back. And when I do, I’ll most likely be killed trying to slaughter a goddess. And I feel better than I have since Cithrin beat her audit. When I have something, I worry about all the things I’d have to do to keep it. Out here, I’ve got nothing. Or at least nothing good. And so I’m free.”
“That sounds like a complex way of saying that your soul is in the shape of a circle, turned on its edge,” Kit said.
Marcus nodded.
“You know I respect your wisdom and enjoy your company, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody likes you when you’re being clever.”
Marcus drifted to sleep even before the harpist quit for the night. He woke in the morning with dew in his hair and the blue-yellow light of dawn reaching across a perfect blue sky.
Two days later, they were walking past a small streetside cafe when Master Kit suddenly paused, his eyes narrowing at the worked iron sign of a dolphin above the door.
“Something?” Marcus said.
“Perhaps,” Kit said. “It’s been … Just a moment, would you?”
Inside, the cafe was dirty and close, the walls stained by years of smoke that came even now from the kitchen, leaving the place in a haze of charcoal smoke, seared fat, and spices that made Marcus’s mouth water just smelling them.
A young and angry-looking Timzinae man barreled out toward them, waving black hands.
“Not open yet,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” “Forgive me,” Master Kit said. “Your name wouldn’t be Epetchi, would it?”
The Timzinae’s eyes went wide, and then disconcertingly did it again as his nictitating membrane slid open with an audible click.
“Kitap!” he shouted, leaping to put his arms around Master Kit. “Kitap, you old bastard! We all thought you were dead by now. You and your friend come back to the kitchen. Ela! Kitap’s here, and you won’t believe it. He’s old and fat.”
Marcus found himself carried along on a wave of other people’s enthusiasm, seated at a cutting table, and eating from a bowl of something that looked like the waste scraped off a cooking grill and tasted better than anything he’d had in years.
All around him, Timzinae men and women were smiling, and little boys and girls so young that their scales were still light brown were trotted out bored but patient to Master Kit, who delighted over each one. When he introduced Marcus by his full name, he could tell that the first man—Epetchi, his name was—was skeptical. But if old Kitap wanted to travel with a man who pretended to be the murderer of kings from Northcoast, it was apparently fine by him.
They weren’t permitted to sleep under the stars anymore. Instead, they had a room in the back of the cafe and bedded down on a thin cotton mattress that had seen cleaner days.
“Friends, I take it?”
“When I first came into the world, I spent the better part of a year in Suddapal,” Master Kit said, laying his bedroll out over the mattress. Probably wise. At least all the insects living in their bedrolls were familiar. “I stayed here. Epetchi was just a boy then. Thin as a stick and couldn’t think about anything but girls.”
“Do you think they can help us, then?”
“I think that if they can, they will. That may not be quite the same thing. But I have more faith in goodwill built with meals and shared stories than goodwill bought from strangers with coin.”
“You know,” Marcus said, “I didn’t force you to pay the finder’s fee.”
“The world’s an odd place,” Kit said, and sat down with a grunt. “The last time I was here, everything was different. I was different, they were. Even the building’s changed. There wasn’t a wall there, at least not that I recall. And yet it was all related. It’s as if the world was a stone, hard and unchanging as we lay paint over it, one layer and then another and then another. We change it by the weight of the stories we bring to it, but we only change what’s there. Not the stone nature of the world.”
“That sounds very deep,” Marcus said. “Don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, though. Do you think they know someone with a good boat?”
The captain of the little sailing boat was a Timzinae woman with a broad face and a wicked smile. At Epetchi’s instructions, they met her near the end of one of the long piers. So far from the shore, Marcus felt he’d
