hand, so that for a long moment, she didn’t move or acknowledge Cithrin’s presence. When she did, she nodded toward a low upholstered divan. Cithrin sat. Magistra Isadau tapped the papers against her fingertips. In the dim light, the darkness of her scales left her expression unreadable.
“In Carse,” she said, “Paerin argued that Antea would pose little threat for years at the least. You disagreed.”
“I did,” Cithrin said.
Isadau held out the letter. Cithrin hesitated for a moment, then took it from her. The handwriting was unquestionably Paerin Clark’s, the cipher as familiar to her eye as normal script. The words, however, were in a different voice.
“It appears that someone else has reached your same conclusions,” Magistra Isadau said. “A faceless voice from the wilds. It happens more often than you’d imagine, and usually it’s someone half mad and in need of coin. But this time … Komme and Paerin addressed this to me, but they meant it for you.”
Cithrin read the full letter from beginning to end, and she felt some part of herself that she hadn’t known was knotted relax. Her mind became stiller than it had been in weeks, clear and cold. For a time, she was in Camnipol, walking the streets that the letter spoke of as best her memory would allow. Detail grew upon detail: prisons, food supplies, the manufacture of weapons, the rising tide of violence against the poor and the powerless, the resentment of the Timzinae conspiracy in which neither she not the letter’s author had the slightest belief. In the end, she folded the letter and looked into the dancing flame of the lantern. She didn’t see it. She was elsewhere. She was in the darkness and the dust, hiding with Aster and Geder, working puzzles about the ancient dragons and the wars long past. If the Geder Palliako she’d known was taking these steps, what would he mean by them? For a moment, she saw him again as he had been the last time they’d been together: in the street smelling of vomit and another man’s blood, trying awkwardly to invite her to stay for tea.
She shuddered.
“Was there a question Komme wanted to ask me about this?”
“Not specifically. Your impression of the author. Whether your experience matched what he says.”
“It does,” Cithrin said. “As to the writer … The details are all as I’d expect, or near enough. The conclusions seem sound. I’ve only been in Camnipol once, and that was under peculiar circumstances, but this description is more plausible for me than the one Paerin gave.”
“So you would trust the source?”
“Not without knowing who it is, no,” Cithrin said. “But I’d read the next letter carefully and treat it with respect. And I’d prepare for another Antean war, though I couldn’t say against whom.”
“Sarakal,” Isadau said, rising from her chair. “The report came in from friends of Komme in Asinport that Lord Skestinin’s fleet had sailed east and south. Komme expects Antea will march early in the spring if they haven’t already.”
Cithrin felt a deep dread welling up in her breast, but she only nodded.
“What is the bank’s position?”
Isadau nodded, her chitinous lips pressing together.
“We’ve taken contracts on supplies. Food, of course. And we bought out any insurance contracts for caravans heading north and invested in three roundships that will be ready to offer an alternate route.”
“And the local coin and spice? Will we be moving it?”
Isadau shook her head.
“Antea can’t win against Sarakal,” she said. “The traditional families pester each other and play out their vicious little intrigues, but nothing unites them like a common enemy. At the height of its power, the Antean Empire found it easier to respect the border than challenge it, and whether the new Lord Regent recognizes it or not, Antea
“You don’t think he’ll come here, then?”
“Even the great rulers are constrained by the world,” Isadau said. “The empire’s ambitions may be vast and ill-considered, but there are still only so many men, so many horses, so many siege engines, and there’s a great deal of territory in Sarakal that will resist being passed through. If the armies of Antea come to Suddapal, it will be because the nature of the world has changed in a way that hasn’t happened since the dragons fell. So no, they won’t come here. Not in my lifetime, and not in yours.”
Clara
The end of the winter’s hunt had always been a difficult and pleasant time. The long, dark weeks drew near their end, and Dawson returned from whatever corner of the empire his friend and king had taken him. He would come back to the holdfast at Osterling Fells exhausted and moody and spend the better part of a week complaining that the journey back to Camnipol for the opening of the season was coming too soon, that there was too much work to be done on his lands. The progress of every improvement and renovation would be weighed and found wanting, the questions of justice that had waited for his word would be answered and justice meted out, and slowly, his shoulders would relax, his smile become easier. He claimed it was the comfort of being at home and with her, but it was also anticipation. She remembered lying in bed with him, their bodies pleasantly spent, and listening to the gossip from the hunt and the dripping of melting ice. Her husband was a prickly man, loyal as a dog and proud as a cat, and he found the guiding star of his life in preserving the world against change. The fears that haunted his worst nights had always been that his children might inherit a kingdom debased from the one he had been given and that his wife might be discontent. When the time came to leave the Fells for their compound in the city, he was champing at the bit to resume the battles and intrigues of court. It was the work he’d been born to.
And so every spring, Dawson would go through the holdings one last time, giving orders and coin, instructions to his vassals that would take them through another summer and guide the lands that he protected safely to autumn. Every spring, husband and wife would travel the dragon’s road back to Camnipol, the rhythm of the team’s hoofs creating martial music as the couple leaned against one another in the well-cushioned carriage. Every spring, she would take charge of the house and see it washed and cleaned and cared for while he snuck out, sheepish and delighted as a boy, to the Fraternity of the Great Bear to drink and smoke and debate with his friends and his enemies.
Every spring until this one.
Clara had seen the first arrivals. The grand carriages of Lord Flor clattering along the black cobbles inside the southern gate, ribbons trailing from it and a crier on horseback clearing its path. Lady Flor, who had more than once sat in Clara’s withdrawing room and shared the intimate details of her husband’s infidelities, had been looking out the window. Perhaps she hadn’t recognized the grey-cloaked woman walking through the street as her old friend. Perhaps she had. That had been three days ago. Winter’s grip loosened, and the court returned to Camnipol.
Clara listened to the familiar knock at her door. Her thin wooden door hardly robust enough to keep the wind out. Not Vincen’s tapping, but the proprietary rap of his cousin Abatha.
“M’lady, I know you’re in there.”
“I am indisposed,” Clara said.
“Second day running you said that,” Abatha said. “Vincen’s worrying you’ve got lady troubles.”
Clara laughed despite herself.
“How delicate of him,” she said.
The wooden flooring creaked as the keep shifted her weight.
“I don’t like to mention it,” Abatha said, and then didn’t go on. She didn’t need to. The rent was due, and Clara didn’t have the coin to pay.
“Yes, thank you,” Clara said, still not rising from her bed. “I will see it taken care of.”
