whether there was a fish on her hook.
Vincen’s objection wasn’t one she’d considered.
“The Cold Hammer,” Vincen said. “You’ve spoken to them about this?”
“Not this, precisely,” Clara said. “I’ve said that if a letter arrived under the Petty name, to hold it for me. They don’t know who it will be coming from nor what it will say.”
“But Clara,” he said, and her name on his lips still had the strange joy of transgression, “they know it’s going to you. Palliako will investigate this. If he goes there, he might track the conspiracy back to you.”
“It won’t happen.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“The man who’s watching for the message was a footman in my house. When his wife birthed their first boy, I went to visit her myself. The babe was ill, and I paid for the cunning man that saved him. The man would move the sky if I asked him to,” Clara said. “Certainly, he won’t balk at a few simple lies.”
Cithrin
Marcus left her again, this time more explicably. There was less confusion. Less of the inexplicable hollowness. Half of her was angry with him for going, but the rest of her seemed resigned. He was leaving her because he felt he had to, and looking at it coldly, she agreed. She was under her own protection now. She had been for over a year. It was only seeing that her half-ackowledged hopes that it might somehow go back to what it had been—or more likely what she only imagined it had been—dashed that felt so cruel. So she took her childish sense of abandonment and added it to the list of things she had to mourn.
It was a long list.
The next Tenthday, there was no march through the streets. The occupying forces didn’t respect the tradition and had sent out an edict prohibiting groups with more than four Timzinae from gathering together in public or ten in private. The temples were empty even where the priests weren’t dead. So instead, Isadau had the little chapel in the compound cleaned with vinegar and soap. Candles and incense burned on the humble wooden altar. Cithrin left her shoes in her room in the morning and walked there, joining the others silently. Jurin, Isadau, and Kani knelt at the front in their finest clothing. Cithrin sat in the middle with the other guests who had taken hospitality in the compound and were now trapped there by the occupation. The servants sat at the back. There were considerably more than ten Timzinae in the room, but no one mentioned it. There weren’t any Anteans either.
Still, Cithrin wondered what would happen if the spider priest came back and asked whether there had been any violations of the edict. It made her uncomfortable to risk the notice of the new authorities without need. There were so many needful risks still to take that wasting them here seemed decadent.
When the time came for the priest to arrive, Yardem Hane stepped out from the hallway. He wore a dark robe that went to his feet, and the rings in his ears looked different from the usual. He lowered his eyes, gathered himself, and brought his wide chin up.
“I am not a priest of your faith,” he said, and his voice rolled through the air like a distant landslide. “Nor, any longer, of my own. I was once a holy man, though I am not now. Magistra Isadau and her siblings have asked me to speak here today, and I agreed to the request so long as I could make it clear that I am not a priest.”
Cithrin smiled. She could see the discomfort in the Tralgu’s wide, canine expression, even if the others couldn’t. Her sympathy for him expressed itself as amusement.
“I have seen a large number of cities fall. Sometimes I’ve been part of the reason that they did. Sometimes I was one of the men who’d tried to protect them and failed. But for whatever reason I was there, what I’ve seen followed a pattern, and though I make no claim to righteousness, I hoped to share that with you here.
“Often when we gather in places of worship, it is in celebration. Celebrations of marriage or of birth. The smaller celebrations of the good in our lives. Even funerals are celebrations of lives well lived. And also we come together to mourn the evil and the sorrow and the pain in the world. Our failings and the world’s. We acknowledge these to each other because, whatever our race, whatever the shapes of our bodies and the inclination of our minds, doing this makes us more human. And by more human, I also mean more holy.”
Cithrin’s amusement and embarrassment on Yardem’s behalf had fallen away. His voice was warm and soft as old flannel. Someone behind her was weeping now, and Yardem frowned in thought. His huge hands patted at the empty air in front of him.
“When a city is taken in war, the loss to those who loved what the city had been is great. But that loss is doubled because we fear to mourn it. For good reason. There are men in Suddapal now who would beat us, possibly kill us, if they felt we were disrespectful of them. In every city I have seen that suffered what your city suffers now, there is a numbness and sense of being cut off from each other. It’s a funeral where no one laughs and no one cries, and it leaves us emptier than the loss alone would have. And so, today, instead of a religious service, I was hoping we might have a funeral for the cities that we have lost. Nus and Inentai and Suddapal. And Vanai.”
To her surprise, Cithrin felt tears in her eyes. She kept her chin high. She might weep, but she wasn’t going to snivel. Yardem spoke for a few moments more about Suddapal and when he had come to the city as a younger man. How it had changed in the years since, and how he had, and how the differences in them both had given him a sense of kinship with it. Then he asked Magistra Isadau to stand, and she spoke about the innate conflict of being a woman of business with her first loyalties to power and profit, and at the same time a citizen of the five cities. And her favorite places within them. Then Jurin spoke about showing his son the cavern at the center of the commons for the first time, and walking with his grandmother to the marketplace the last time she went. He talked of the fear he felt for the children taken by Antea. And soon, Cithrin was making no pretense of dignity, nor was anyone else. One by one, the people stood and spoke or else only sobbed, and Cithrin wept with them.
She didn’t see Yardem come to her side. His hand was simply on hers, and then without knowing how it had happened, he was leading her up to the altar. The faces looked up at her, waiting for her to speak.
“Suddapal wasn’t my city,” she said. “That was Vanai. The Antean army took it … took it from me. And they took the people who raised me and loved me, if anybody did. There was a place by the canal by the bank house where there was a little boy who sold coffee with his father, and they … they took them too. They took everything there and they burned it.”
A sorrow she hadn’t known was there opened in her, vast as oceans, and she hung her head for a moment and Yardem stepped toward her. She put out a hand to stop him, gritted her teeth, and raised her head.
“I haven’t cried. I haven’t mourned. I haven’t let myself be angry for that loss. I never felt it because feeling it would have broken me. And now, with all of you here as witness, I am broken. I am broken, but I’m not dead. And I am not
The hand that touched her shoulder wasn’t Yardem’s. Magistra Isadau turned Cithrin to her, wrapped her arms around Cithrin’s shaking body, and pulled her close. Cithrin wept, and more than wept. She howled like a baby who’d lost her mother and her father, which she also was. She screamed into the older woman’s flesh, and she did it with half a hundred men and women watching her do it, and she felt no shame.
“Good girl,” Isadau murmured. “Oh, good, good girl. You’ll be fine. Your heart isn’t going to die. You’re fine.”
Cithrin held the Timzinae woman close and would not let her go.
It’s going to fall apart,” Yardem said. “All respect, the network was dangerous when it was only standing up against soldiers, bureaucrats, and cunning men. These tainted priests make it impossible.”
“I know,” Isadau said. “Two of the people who agreed to work with me have already missed meetings. I was able to get word out that if the priest questions you, not to answer any questions. They aren’t lying if they don’t speak.”
Yardem grunted like he had taken a blow. Isadau raised her eyebrows.
“Not speaking can be made difficult,” he said.
The courtyard had turned from lush green to leathery brown as if overnight. Autumn had come to Suddapal,
