The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (36 page)

Her voice, when it came, was perfectly calm. “Do you think about the people you’ve killed?”

Geder blinked, thrown off by the change of subject. “Who? You mean Dawson?”

“Dawson Kalliam,” Cithrin said. “The others who fought with him. Lord Ternigan. The people of the court who weren’t loyal enough. The men and women in Elassae and Vanai. Sarakal. Birancour. The hostage children. All of the thousands who would be alive if things had gone a little differently. Do you think of them?”

For a moment, he saw the little Timzinae girl in his memory. The one he’d had called back from the edge. And the
silhouette of a woman against the flames of a burning city. “I do sometimes,” he said, and sighed. “I don’t like to, but I do. Why do you ask?”

“I have never laughed at you.”

Outside, Aster said something and Kit responded. A bell rang from somewhere deeper in the house, and a man’s voice called out. The door slave, most likely. Geder couldn’t look away from her. So many nights, all he’d thought about was her mouth, her body, the look in her perfect eyes. His heart felt full and heavy with her presence, like it was the only real thing there was about him.

“Thank you,” he said softly, and she nodded. Footsteps hurried toward them from the house. Geder didn’t know if he wanted them to turn aside or hurry to him. The moment was perfect and painful and too rich to stand for long. When the knock came at the door, Geder looked deep into Cithrin’s perfect eyes and said
Come in
as if the words meant
I love you
.

His father entered the room, his eyes bright with excitement. He held a scrap of paper in his hand, yellow and black in the light of the candles. “There’s a message come, my boy,” Lehrer said. “From the Kingspire. A message.”

Geder rose as his father pressed the paper into his hand. The script was Basrahip’s. He recognized the shapes of the letters even before he read the words. It said a great deal about where Geder and Basrahip had been and what they had become that the priest used these dead words he so much despised to seek Geder out.

“They’ve arrived,” he said. “The last of the priests have come to the temple. Basrahip wants to know when I want them to gather so that I can share my revelations.” Cithrin made a small noise at the back of her throat and closed her
eyes. It might have been joy or fear or something of both. He tucked the paper into his belt. “What should I tell him?”

“Tomorrow, midday,” Cithrin said. “That will give us time to arrange everything we need.”

“Tomorrow then,” Geder said with a sharp nod.
I will kiss you tomorrow
.

T
he day moved quickly and quietly as a rat in a dining hall. Marcus brought the actors out to the gardens, drilling each of them in turn, Yardem at his side. Geder, thankfully, went back to the Kingspire to make a full night of preparations there. As many of the servants and guards as could be sent away from the great structure would be. Even the royal guards were to be stationed outside the royal quarter, their backs to the Kingspire ready to fend off some imagined attack from the streets. And Geder had taken Aster with him, which cut Cithrin’s heart a little. Seeing the boy, she’d realized she’d missed him. Or if not quite him, at least the thought of him. In a better world, she’d have known Aster more.

The little drawing room by the garden became a war room. Or no, not that. Something like it, but dedicated to something different. As desperate, as dangerous, as likely to end in sudden death, but different. She had to believe that.

“We’ll need to have the letters out to the farms as soon as the couriers won’t get cut down by the Timzinae,” Cithrin said.

“We could send them to the south,” Clara suggested.

“They won’t leave the south road open. The main body of the army will swing to the west, but they can’t have a siege with an open route to the south.”

“No,” Clara said. “No, of course not.”

The siege of Camnipol that would mean the end of the Antean Empire. The death of Clara’s friends and family, the sacking of her city. It was the war they were trying to stop, it and all the wars after it. Or as many of them as Cithrin could.

“The gaol will be the first thing,” Cithrin said. “And after that…”

“I have… friends ready,” Clara said. “I’ve sent word. When we go out the gates, we’ll be well accompanied. There’s a baker I used to frequent near the Prisoner’s Span? I have him devoting himself to raisin cakes and lemon bread. And there’s a footman who used to serve at my house. Back when I had a house. He’s gathering up toys. Dolls, you know. Little things for the children.”

Cithrin took Clara’s hand, and the older woman’s head bent forward. Wet tracks slid through the powder on her cheeks, and Cithrin felt tears of her own coming up in answer. She didn’t know what they were for. She thought Isadau would have understood.

“I feel as if I’ve been playing at making peace my whole life. Only playing. Now I look at all my nation has done,” Clara said, “and I think we’re going to defend ourselves with children’s baubles and ribbon. A knife will cut through that so quickly, and so deep.”

“It’s how peace gets made,” Cithrin said. “At least I hope it is.”

“It is
when
it is,” Clara said, “but I wonder whether we deserve mercy.”

“It isn’t mercy if you deserve it. Mercy justified is only justice.”

Clara laughed once and mirthlessly. “That has all the virtue of being true and none of the comfort.”

“It wasn’t mine. Someone told me it once. I don’t remember who.”

“Someone with more mind than heart,” Clara said, and looked at the candle on the little table by the wall. It had already burned a third of its length. “I should go back now. It would be strange if I weren’t at Lord Skestinin’s home.” Her voice carried a burden of dread, and she wiped at the tears angrily.

“Is there something happening there?” Cithrin asked.

“Yes, dear. My son the priest has come home from Birancour. Vicarian is no doubt waiting for me.”

And you will let him go to his death
, Cithrin thought. The two women were silent for a long time before Clara rose, placed her hand briefly on Cithrin’s head as if passing her a blessing, and left. Cithrin sat alone after that, listening to the patter of moths against the screens and the voices of Sandr and Lak, Charlit Soon and Cary, Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane and Lehrer Palliako. Her chest hurt, just between her breasts and up a little, and she tried to remember if she’d been hit there. It felt like a bruise, but she came to the conclusion it was only sorrow and nothing to be done about that.

She was in her room near midnight, a third bottle of wine on its way to ignominious death by her hand, when the soft knock came at the door. She rose, sat, and rose again more carefully. The little twinge of shame she felt at being drunk was easy enough to push away. Without the wine, she’d have been sick hours ago. She opened the door, her chin already lifted in defiance. Marcus Wester stood alone in the corridor, not even Yardem at his side.

He looked old. Still strong, but old. His hair had gone whiter since the first time she’d seen him on the caravan from Vanai. His skin had a transparency despite a lifetime
of being roughened by the sun. His eyes were the same, though, and the way he held himself.

He nodded to her. “You sent for me?”

“Hours ago,” she said. “I assumed you’d chosen not to come.”

“Lost track of time. Night before an action, I’m always worried.”

She held the bottle out to him. “So am I.”

He hesitated, but only for a moment. He sat on the little stool beside the washbasin and she sat on the bed. He was a handsome man, well bruised by the world. He wore his scars and weariness gracefully. She wondered whether, when she was as old, she would do the same. He wiped the mouth of the bottle with his sleeve and drank. Smacking his lips, he passed it back to her.

“Not bad,” he said.

“I didn’t see call to save anything for a better occasion.”

“Well, there’ll be a better one along shortly or else not at all,” he said.

“Call this a hedge, then. If we lose, at least I won’t have spared the good wine.”

“Thanks for sharing it.”

“And,” she said, and then faltered. She looked at her feet. The room wasn’t spinning. She wished that it were. If her mind had lost a little more of its clarity, this might have been easier. “Thank you. For being who you’ve been to me.”

“Not sure what you—”

“Don’t. Not now. Not tonight.”

It was the mercenary captain’s turn to look away. “Right. Night before the battle. Sorry.”

“I met you when I was a child who thought walking outside the city walls was like jumping off a cliff. I have taken terrible risks with myself and the people around me, and
I’ve won more than I lost. And you have done everything you could to keep me safe. We don’t talk about it. We don’t say it. But it’s true, and I want you to know that I appreciate it. All of it.”

“It’s the… Hell. Yeah. All right.” Marcus took a deep breath and held his hand out for the bottle. This time when he took it, he nearly drained it. “You’re near the age my daughter would have been. A little younger now than my wife was when I met her. You’re not them, but you fit in that part of my head for a time.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be them.”

“No, not that. Be sorry for something else if you have to, but not for that. I did what I did because I thought it wanted doing. That’s all. And I knew you weren’t my daughter. Yardem kept pointing it out, for one thing. It’s been… it’s been the longest, strangest job I ever took. I always thought of bankers as being dull.”

She laughed. “We want you to think that.”

His sheepish grin made him look younger. She could see who he’d been as a boy. “Picked up that part. Took me long enough, but I see it. You… you didn’t know your parents, yeah?”

“I remember remembering them, but nothing more than that.”

“For all this? They’d be proud of you, scared as hell, I expect, but proud.”

“They don’t care,” Cithrin said, taking back the bottle. “They haven’t cared in decades. They’re dead.”

She drank the wine to the dregs. There had been a bitterness in her words that surprised her. If someone else had said it, she’d have said they sounded hurt, but she didn’t feel it. To her surprise, Marcus laughed. “You’re one ahead of me, then. Fine. I’m proud of you, then. Proud to know you,
proud to work for you. Proud of all you’ve done, though God knows I don’t understand half of it.”

“If we die tomorrow…”

“Then we do,” Marcus said with a shrug. “If it’s all the same, I’d prefer to go first. Bad for my reputation if you die before me, and it’s hard enough to get jobs when you won’t work for kings.”

“I’ll try to survive, then.”

“Do that,” Marcus said. He looked up at her from under lowered brows. “What are the chances I’ll be able to keep you from coming to the Kingspire?”

“Poor,” Cithrin said.

“I’ll be there to call Inys. Yardem’s going to run sheepdog on Palliako. Chances are decent that the dragon’ll follow up killing the priests by turning everyone else there to slag. Not sure how having you present’s going to improve things.”

“You might get your wish and die before me,” Cithrin said. “If you fall, I’m picking up your damned blade myself.”

T
he last morning—she couldn’t think of it as anything else—dawned without a moment of sleep behind it. The day came early in the high summer, and rich with birdsong and the clatter of carts in the streets. Cithrin washed, changed into the robes that would let her pass as a servant, and tried to prepare her heart for what was to come. She could as easily have willed herself to fly.

The sunlight slanted in from the east when they set out through the cobbled streets. Lehrer Palliako led them, riding a tall black horse and bright clothes like a man heading for a festival. Or, less charitably, performing at one. He was there to be seen and to draw any casual attention to himself and away from the motley train of servants behind him.

For the first few streets, Cithrin felt her heart in her
throat. But with every corner they passed, every tradesman who pulled aside to make way for the Lord Regent’s father, every street cleaner waiting with barrow and shovel for them to pass, every beggar and child and half-wild dog that saw them without any light coming into their eyes, she felt a strange elation growing in her.

No one knew, and so no one saw. They were disguised as much by their improbability as by their robes. The grey-haired Kurtadam woman selling wilted cabbages in the square lived in a world where the question was how the goddess and the Lord Regent were going to defeat the roach army. If she even thought of that. More likely, she wasn’t even concerned with that so much as whether she’d be able to get rid of her produce before it started to rot. The baker’s boy with his handcart piled with sacks of flour didn’t see a suspicious bunch of servants trailing after an anxious-looking nobleman so much as an obstacle in his morning errands that he had to track around. Cithrin walked among them unrecognized either for herself or the change she was about to bring upon them all. Or try to, at any rate.

Geder waited at an ivied archway, the entrance to one of the royal gardens. He wore a light summer tunic with braiding of gold down the sides, and the crown of his regency on his head. His personal guard stood along the edge of the garden, facing out, and created the sense of a wall even in the stretches where no actual wall existed. When the guard stood aside to let the grooms help the Lord Regent’s father off his mount, Cithrin had to bite her lips to keep from laughing. She was fairly certain that once she’d started, it would have been hard to stop, and it wouldn’t be the sort of laughter that promised sanity.

After the press and noise and stink of the streets, the royal quarter seemed too quiet and sparsely peopled to be part of
the same city. No gardeners tended the deep-green hedges and breeze-shuddered flowers, no slaves sang at the little hidden corners to sweeten the summer air for the court. It was expected, of course. She’d told Geder to send as many people as he could away. To see it all in motion was eerie all the same.

Once they were out of sight of the guard, Geder stopped pretending to walk with his father and came to her side. His eyes were bright and he bounced on the balls of his feet with every step, like a boy excited for cake.

“The pieces are in place?” Marcus asked even before Geder could speak.

“The blacksmith delivered them this morning,” Geder said.

“The priests?” Cithrin said. Something passed through Geder’s expression that she couldn’t read, a flicker here then gone that reminded her of the day she’d seen him cut down Dawson Kalliam. She was almost pleased to see it.

“Gathering. It isn’t like it was before, but I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or I have. It seems like there’s more fighting now. They rub each other the wrong ways all the time. Basrahip’s been going to all of them and promising how they’ll all be reconciled and I have seen her plan.”

“Both true,” Cithrin said, “if not the way he means it.”

“He keeps asking to see me before the gathering at the temple, but I’ve put him off. Better not to have the chance for things to go wrong.”

Cithrin made a little sound of agreement.

When they reached the entrance of the Kingspire, the wide doors stood open and the great halls beyond empty. From so near, the banner of the goddess was only a shifting darkness that clung to the walls high above her. A shadow the light couldn’t dispel. The sun had risen higher than she’d expected, the morning more than half-gone already.

Master Kit and Cary huddled for a moment with the rest of the players, bowed their heads together the way they sometimes did before a performance. Marcus stood at Geder’s side, ignoring the Lord Regent’s almost palpable annoyance. Rough cloth wrapped the poisoned sword on his back, too valuable to discard and too dangerous to expose, especially here where so many of the priests might know it for what it was.

A sparrow flew past, its fluttering brown wings loud in the air.

“Torch ready?” Marcus asked.

“On the dueling ground,” Geder said, nodding to the west and the great chasm of the Division. “All that needs is lighting. How… how long will it take before the dragon comes?”

“Damned if I know,” Marcus said. “Great bastard may not show up at all.”

He clapped Geder’s shoulder and walked away. Geder glanced from Cithrin to Yardem to the captain’s sword-crossed and retreating back. “He’s joking, isn’t he? The dragon’s coming. It’s going to be here.”

“There’s always some element of improvisation in the plan,” Yardem said mildly, and flicked his ear. “Looks a long way up. We should go. You staying here, Magistra?”