The Tyrant's Law

Captain Marcus Wester




Marcus leaned against the slick, waxy bark of the tree and stared out over the valley. Their recent days in the cloud forest had kept his horizon close. Fifteen feet, twenty at most. The thick-packed trees, stubborn brush, and warm mist had tied a cloth across his eyes until he felt that each day had ended in the same stand of trees by the same brook, lulled to sleep by the same bright-colored birds. When he came to the ridge, it was like the world cracking open. Mountains as steep and sharp as black knives rose toward the white sky. Row after row, each more grey than the one before, until he could imagine them receding forever. The sun, high and to his left, was little more than a brighter stretch of haze.

The steady footfalls of his companion came up from behind him, as familiar as his own breath.

“Isn’t …” Marcus said, then coughed and tried again. “Isn’t there supposed to be a winter? I remember there being winter.”

“I think you’ll find we’re too far south,” Kitap rol Keshmet said, “and that seasons don’t behave the same way here that they did north of the Inner Sea.”

“No winter, then.”

“I’m afraid there’s only the wet season and the dry.”

“Pity we couldn’t have come in the dry season.”

“We did.”

“Ah.” Marcus pushed himself back up to standing. “I’m enjoying all this less than I’d hoped to.”

Kit’s laughter rolled.

“I’m not joking,” Marcus said.

“I know you aren’t. The village should be just ahead.”

For most of his life, Marcus had thought of Lyoneia as another kingdom, large and divided against itself, but in essence familiar. The great moat of the Inner Sea had kept the threat of war from being a greater concern than the battles and intrigues nearer at hand. There were mercenary companies that wintered in Lyoneian ports or took guard contracts when merchants went overland to the Southling cities for silver and spice. The vastness of the land and its impassibility surprised him, as well as its profound differences from the places he’d known.

The land itself fought against travel: sharp, stony peaks with bogs at their bases; thick, snake-rich forests; wetlands crossed by stone roads long since fallen to rubble. Farmable land was rare and guarded, illness was common and hard to cure, and the villages, towns, and cities distrustful of two Firstblood men traveling alone. When Kit had said that the mules would cause more delay than they were worth, Marcus had disagreed. They’d sold the last of them at a trading post five days before, and Marcus hadn’t missed them yet. Marcus found himself longing for the plains and mountains of Birancour and the Free Cities, the Pût and Elassae. Even Northcoast and Imperial Antea, for all their faults, had the dragon’s roads, jade green and more permanent than mountains. For the most part, they had set borders too, and the corruption of their politics was a familiar kind.

The Southling guards appeared among the trees. Their massive black eyes and pale skins made them seem young, but they were men full grown. Warriors with bows drawn and swords at the ready. It was easy to underestimate a Southling, but any of the thirteen races could kill. Even the Drowned. Marcus held his arms wide, hands open to show that his blade was sheathed.

“We mean no harm,” Kit said. “We are no threat to your people.”

Despite all their travels together, despite having seen the spiders that lived in Kit’s blood and testing the powers that they gave to the old actor, Marcus couldn’t hear anything different when he spoke. The warm tone of voice, the careful diction, the humor and sorrow were all just the same. Only instead of saying, I believe you will find us harmless, or I hope you will forgive our intrusion—instead of pointing all the meaning back to him and his own fallibility—he made an assertion. The corruption in his blood refused to be doubted.

The Southlings blinked. They didn’t lower their weapons, but they held them a fraction less tightly.

“You are what?” one of the bowmen demanded.

“Travelers,” Kit said. “Seekers. I am called Kitap rol Keshmet, and this is Marcus Wester. We have come from far to the north to speak with your mother, if she will allow it.”

“No blades come to the mother, no.”

“You may take our swords,” Kit said.

The Southlings turned to one another, speaking in a tongue Marcus had never heard before. His nose itched but he didn’t reach in to scratch it. He didn’t want the soldiers to think he was reaching for a weapon. Kit’s coarse hair and wiry beard framed his calm, smiling face, as if he were an uncle returned from a long journey with salt taffy in his pockets and tall tales to amuse the children.

“If we ever come to a place they can’t understand your words,” Marcus said, “what happens then?”

“I expect that will be more difficult,” Kit said.

The Southlings’ gabble reached a climax, and the bowman blinked at them.

“Throw down your blades, you,” he said. “We take you motherwards.”

Slowly, Marcus unbuckled his belt, pulled it off, and tossed sword and scabbard to the mossy ground. Kit did the same, and added the dagger from his sleeve as well. One of the younger Southlings collected them. The bowman turned and seemed to vanish into the tangle of trees. Marcus and Kit had to struggle to find him again, and then to keep up.

The trail was visible once Marcus saw the Southlings using it, but it would have been easy to overlook. The trees and brush hadn’t been hacked back, but shaped. There were no axe-cut branches or roped-back twigs to show that this was the habitation of humanity. The path was obscure. Hidden. Sometimes the way doubled back, often under high trees where archers might perch. There were no great stone walls and no place to build them, but the forest itself was a kind of fortification.

It seemed like half a day before they reached the first unmistakable signs of human habitation. A stone-paved yard with thatched huts all around it seemed to emerge from the trees like someone walking out of a fog. That the stone was only marked by a green patina where moss had been scraped away, that the fissures in the pavement hadn’t become home to saplings was evidence enough that the place was maintained. Holding the forest at bay, even for so small a space as this, would have been a lifetime’s work. And at the far side of the yard, a massive statue. Perhaps it had once been of a human—Southling or Jasuru or Firstblood. The long ages had eroded it until it was almost shapeless. At at its base, a larger hut with a plume of pale smoke rising from the hole at its top.

The bowman turned to them, lifting a hand.

“You will wait here,” he said. “I will ask our mother if she will speak to you.”

“I am very grateful,” Kit said, lowering himself to the stone.

Marcus sat too. The other warriors who had escorted them remained standing and armed, but Marcus felt no sense of threat from them. The way they held themselves was more proprietary, as if they’d brought some bizarre bird back from the hunt. Before long, people began to emerge from the shadows of the huts. Children haunted the doorways, wide eyes so large they seemed about to consume their faces. And then women and older men, yawning and fresh from sleep. Marcus had forgotten more than once that Southlings were more comfortable in the night. The dragons had made them that way. They came out slowly, one at at time, and then in groups, until something between thirty and forty men, women, and children talked and laughed and pointed from the edge of the yard. There were more than could have fit into the little huts, so Marcus assumed that there were structures under the ground—tunnels or old ruins or some such—where the villagers spent their sleeping days.

He wouldn’t have been surprised to sit on the smooth stones, legs crossed and aching and the insects making a feast of him, until the middle of the night. Instead, the village mother took pity on them. The sun had sunk behind the forest canopy, the sky turned to rose and gold with only the first hints of twilight’s ash, when the bowman returned with an old man who wore a chain of gold around his neck and brightly dyed cloth around his elbows and knees. The cunning man, or anyway a Southling village’s version of one. The cunning man walked a slow circle around them, his breath thick and heavy. Marcus felt the air on the back of his neck stirring. Kit watched solemnly as the cunning man finished his course, clapped his hands together, and shouted. A burst of light and sudden, vicious cold, and then the cunning man was walking up to them, grinning. His hand touched Marcus’s shoulder, and the two men nodded to one another, smiling. A little show of magic and force to keep them in line, then, followed by welcome. Kit’s grin was warm, open, friendly. The wall of guards dissolved, and the villagers came closer, as pleased and curious as if Marcus had been a two-headed puppy. A girl of perhaps six years came up to Marcus, holding out a broad green leaf as a present. When he took it, she giggled and fled.

“The mother rests now, but she will speak to you soon,” the cunning man said. “Very soon.”

“Give her our thanks,” Marcus said.

The haze went grey and then black. No starlight could fight its way through the thick air, and the moon was only a lighter quarter of the sky. Around them, the life of the village bustled. Children carried great buckets of water slung on sticks. A group of old men sat by one of the huts smoking something sweeter than tobacco and weaving long, thin strips of bark into rope. Another group of armed men arrived carrying a dead animal that looked like a longskulled boar, and for a moment the two strange travelers became only the second most interesting event of the night. Men and women watched as the animal was skinned and butchered. The carcass was being rubbed with a brown savory-smelling paste and prepared for the cookfire when the cunning man appeared again at Marcus’s elbow.

“Now,” he said. “Come both with me.”

The village mother’s hut was thick-walled and smaller inside than Marcus had expected. What room there was had been devoted to a single greeting chamber as ornate and impressive in its way as the greatest throne rooms of Northcoast. A dozen silent men knelt against the walls, swords and daggers in their hands. The dim orange light came from a single brazier, and by it the woman in the wooden chair seemed to float in a velvet blackness. Her pale skin caught the light, glowed with it. Her gown was simply cut, but glittering with soft metal thread and gemstones. She could have been a child or a woman Marcus’s age. Either way, she was beautiful.

Kit sank to his knees, and Marcus followed his example.

“Most gracious lady,” Kit said. “We thank you for speaking with us. We have come very far, and we are in need of your aid.”

The village mother smiled. Younger, Marcus thought. She had to be younger than he was.

“It is rare that travelers come so far to ask favors of me. More often, those who ask for my help find themselves where they had not meant to be.”

Kit fumbled for a moment in the darkness, then drew a folded parchment from his belt and unfolded it. Marcus couldn’t see it, but he didn’t need to. He’d studied the curves and angles of that map a thousand times, and in better light. If the village mother kept it or destroyed it, Marcus could draw it again from memory.

“A great evil has woken in the north,” Kit said. “A corruption from before the fall of the dragons. Already its chaos is spreading. With time, it will even reach here.”

The village mother nodded to the cunning man. He took the parchment from Kit’s hand and walked the few steps to her. Her gaze flickered across it, and the faintest scowl touched the corners of her mouth.

“And this?” she asked.

“There are tales of an ancient reliquary. Items of power gathered together by Assian Bey in the days after the fall of the Dragon Empire. Among these, there is said to be a blade envenomed by the art of the greatest of dragons. We have the task of finding this sword, carrying it back to the north, and with it, ending the corruption that threatens us all.”

Three of the men against the wall shifted their weight. With the poor light, it was hard to say, but Marcus had the impression that they were less preparing for an attack than seeing how he and Kit would react if they feared one. With as many as there were, he and Kit would be cut down in a breath. He might be able to kill or hurt one of the others. Two if he were lucky. Since there was no way to answer the threat, he ignored it.

“Three generations ago,” Kit continued, “a scholar and adventurer led an expedition from Herez. He was a Dartinae who went by the name of Akad Silas. He wrote back to his wife from the field. That which you are holding is said to come from the last reports that came from him. It suggests that he and his men were very near here, and that he believed they had found signs of the reliquary’s existence. I have come here to beg of you, gracious lady. If you know anything of this treasure or of the Silas expedition, please tell me. The fate of the world rests upon it.”

“And you?” the village mother said. It took a moment before Marcus realized she was speaking to him.

“Following Kit,” Marcus said. “Keeping him out of trouble.”

Her sniff carried a cartload of contempt. She handed the parchment back to the cunning man, who bowed until his forehead was even with his knees before he turned and put it in Kit’s outstretched hand.

“I am sorry, noble wanderer. You have wasted your time,” she said. “I know nothing of this adventurer, and I have never heard of any such reliquary.”

The soft exhalation, almost a grunt, that came from Kit might have been the blow of bitter disappointment. But Marcus was fairly sure it wasn’t.

“The map shows a place not far from here where Silas believed he would gain entrance. There is nothing there?”

“There is not. Nor is there any such place within the range of my people. You have been misled.”

Kit ran his hand over his beard to cover a smile.

“I am bitterly sorry to hear this,” he said. “But I thank you for your kindness and your hospitality.”

“You and your servant are welcome to remain and take your rest.” Her voice was gentler now. Marcus imagined that she would be glad to be so easily believed. With a man other than Kit, she might have been.

“You are kind,” Kit said. “Please, let me give you this map as a gift. It is a lie set in ink, but it has its beauty. It is of little use to me now, but it does show something of the lands which belong to you and your people.”

“I accept your gift. I did not expect northerners to be so thoughtful.”

“Northerners are as stones in soft earth,” Kit said. “We’re all different kinds. And some, perhaps, worth more than others.”

The fruit and meat that waited for them when they emerged from the hut would have been the midday meal for any of the other races of humanity. They ate in darkness apart from a small lamp placed near them as a courtesy. Around them, the bustle of village life went on by thin moonlight. The meat from the long-faced boar was sweet and a little gamey, but it was fresh and cooked with onions. A woman brought clay bowls of fresh, cold water to them. Marcus wouldn’t have been more pleased by the finest wine.

On the farther side of the yard, a circle of children sat, whispering into one another’s ears and occasionally breaking out in roars of laughter. Kit watched them with a sour expression.

“Problem?” Marcus asked.

Kit nodded toward the children at their game.

“You’ve played that?” he asked.

“Everyone’s played that. Whisper in one ear, then repeat it until something absurd comes out the far end. Harmless enough.”

“I dislike it,” Kit said. “I’m afraid that all the world’s like that. A long chain of men and women speaking what they believe as clearly as they can, and the truth leaking out like they were trying to hold water in their fists. Even without lies, without deceit, that over there is the best we can manage. A crust of misunderstandings. And all of history is made that way.”

Marcus nodded. The tone Kit spoke in said more than the actual words. “She was lying, then?”

“She was. Not all of it. When she said the Silas map didn’t show where the reliquary was, that was truth. When she said it wasn’t in the range of her people … that was less than true.”

“So it’s close, then.”

Kit took an onion and bit into it, shrugging.

“Probably. Certainly she believes it is.”

“That’s good.”

“On the other hand, it seems to me she’s protective of it. If we press on, the locals may be less friendly than they’ve been.”

The children reached the end of their round, and a great roar of laughter rose up in the darkness. The sounds of daytime laid over the shoulders of night left Marcus uneasy. Now, as guests, it was only a peculiarity of Southling hospitality; the working of a mostly unseen village. When they pressed on unwelcome, there could be other sounds with fewer children and less laughter. He remembered someone telling him that fighting a Southling at night was like fighting with a blindfold. From behind them, a man’s voice called out in the darkness. To their left, another voice answered. The haze thinned enough that the moon showed through in a halo of its own light, too dim to cast a shadow. An insect landed on Marcus’s hand and he shooed it away.

“How much do we know about what happened to the Silas expedition?” Marcus asked.

“Well,” Kit said, his voice reflective and philosophical, “we’re fairly certain they didn’t come back.”





Clara




Once she knew to look, the evidence was everywhere. The snow-paved streets of Camnipol had hardly recovered from the violence of the summer, but the preparations had begun anew. Imri, once the cook’s assistant in Clara’s kitchens, was seeing a carter’s boy who’d been hauling pig iron to the forges since before midwinter. When Clara stopped by the forges on a pretext, all she saw were the long, easily bent spear points Dawson used to deride. They were meant to lodge in a shield and then hang from it, weighting a soldier’s arm, slowing him and breaking his formation. She could hear her husband’s snort of contempt, could see the dismissive scowl. A weapon for house painters, he’d have called it, and nothing that a nobleman would employ. The men who ran the city granaries smoked in the alley and shook their heads. The orders had come that they should not expect the spring wheat crop to refill the stores. It didn’t take Clara a great leap to guess where that food might go. In the temples, the priests intoned psalms about loyalty and the bearing of burdens now for greater glory later, and not of justice or the love of peace. And even in the traditionalist temples, the brown-robes of Geder Palliako’s spider goddess sometimes took the pulpit, declaiming in the accents of the Keshet and making cutting remarks about insects and cockroaches that seemed to implicate the Timzinae without ever quite putting a name to them. The magistrates had begun to sentence fewer young men to the cages and more to martial service. The prisons rose brick by pale brick, as much threat as architecture.

The true conversations of power, she no longer had the means to reach. Even those among the noble classes who still took her company were at their holdings or with the hunt. When the first thaw came, it would certainly be different. She would surely be able to discover which direction Palliako meant to send his blades. And also by then, it would all be too far gone to prevent. Walking across the bridges and through the narrow streets, she felt as if she were balancing on a landslide. It was all so much larger than she was that it might as well have been the weather. She had as much ability to stop this as to turn aside a storm.

But Jorey would come back, and Vicarian. Perhaps, one day, Barriath would return from his exile or at least write from it. Her boys. Help from Elisia seemed unlikely, but Clara would send letters to her all the same. The worst her daughter could do was burn them unread. In the meantime, she walked through the city, Vincen Coe at her side, seeking what information she could and putting it together as best she might.

Even when it took her to places that she would have been wiser to avoid.

Stay behind me, my lady,” Vincen said.

“M’lady, is it?” the smallest of the three men said, his grin gap-toothed and unpleasant. “’Strue, then is it? That’s Treacher Kalliam’s widow.”

“What was it like, sleeping with a traitor?” the largest of them asked.

Clara held her chin up. Rage and humiliation fought against copper-tasting fear, but she didn’t let it show. The street was narrow enough that passing him would be difficult without risking the huntsman’s blade. She didn’t know what would happen if they tried to walk past without showing more steel or making their threats explicit.

“You have no business with us,” she said. “Let us pass.”

The smallest one drew a battered knife and began to clean his thumbnail with it, ignoring her words. “Long way you’ve come from there to here.”

Vincen kept himself between her and the three men. She couldn’t imagine Vincen would allow himself to be surrounded, but neither would he wish to make the first blow. It would be a choice of tragedies. Like so many things.

“We don’t want trouble,” Vincen said.

“Who does?” the largest man said, mock-philosophically, and he strode forward.

Vincen’s blade flicked out, cutting the air. The larger man growled and drew a short, curved blade. Its edge shone in the dim light. It was hardly longer than a child’s forearm, and well suited for violence in the confines of the narrow way. Vincen stepped back, using the reach of his own blade to keep the man at distance and set himself for the coming blow.

“We’ve come to see Ammit No-Thumb,” Clara said. “Perhaps you gentlemen could point the way.”

The middle one, silent until now, spoke. His voice was slow, but with a depth of intelligence that gave Clara something like hope.

“What business would you have with our Ammit?”

“I met his daughter on the Prisoner’s Span last week, and she mentioned that she had had some distress. I have a tea that might be of some use to her, and so I’ve brought it. Or will, if you’ll let us past.”

“Ammit’s no friend of mine,” the smallest said. He had taken a firmer grip on his blade. The largest took a step forward, and Vincen slid to block his progress.

“What sort of distress?” the middle one asked.

Clara hoisted her eyebrow and didn’t speak. In truth, she had nothing more than a few pinches of tobacco and a pocketful of dried apples, but she’d spoken to the girl long enough to know Ammit was a kind soul and that she lived nearby. That she would be known and thought of kindly was a gamble. The silence stretched. The smallest man glanced over his shoulder, then back.

“You’re in the wrong street,” the middle one said. “Go back to the turning and go three more toward the wall. There’s a red house with a half dozen barrels along the side. Turn there.”

“My thanks,” Clara said with a nod, then turned and walked briskly back along the narrow street. Her throat felt thin as a straw and her heart beat like a sparrow. A moment later, Vincen was behind her.

“Not so quickly,” he murmured. “Nothing like running to call the chase.”

Clara forced herself to walk more slowly, as if she belonged there. As if she were safe.

“Has it always been like this?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“Ma’am?”

“The knives and the violence. The inability to walk through the city without fear of being bled. Has Camnipol always been like this, and I didn’t know it, or is this a change?”

“Change,” Vincen said without even a pause for thought. “There’s always rough places. A taproom with a bad reputation. A street where men gather when they’re unwelcome anyplace else. But since the summer … no, it’s worse.”

“Well. At least it isn’t only that I was too blind to see it.”

The pale sky held the red and gold of sunset to the west and the deepening indigo to the east. With every day that passed, the light grew a little longer, the morning a little brighter. First thaw would, she guessed, come early this year. She hoped it was an omen of a gentler year, but she couldn’t bring herself as far as belief. She walked north, Vincen at her side. He didn’t take her arm, but stood near enough to her that she could take his if she chose. It seemed the whole of their relationship, writ small. When she passed the turning that would have taken them to the boarding house, he didn’t so much as break stride.

Dawson Kalliam, once Baron of Osterling Fells and her husband of decades, had no grave. After his execution, the body had been taken to the Silver Bridge and cast into the Division like common trash. Somewhere, far below, his bones lay amid the water and chaos. Tradition set the penalty for retrieving him for a gentler burial to be death, and Clara felt sure it would be upheld. And so every few days she found herself walking out to the middle of the span to spend a moment with the high and open air that had swallowed the last of her husband.

Below her, the pigeons turned in their flock, gliding on the drafts and perching on the Division’s deep sides or the lower, lesser bridges that spanned the gap farther down. She closed her eyes and bowed her head as she’d seen her mother do before her own father’s ashes. It was what a woman did when she was remembering a man who had been her heart and was gone. It wasn’t the first death she’d mourned. She’d lost her own father, her own mother. A brother taken by fever when she’d been hardly more than a girl. She knew what to expect, and how terrible it would be. How terrible it always was. The knowledge took nothing from the pain, or if not nothing, surely not enough.

After a time, she took a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbed away the tears, and walked back to the edge of the span where Vincen was waiting. He knew why she came, and he would not cross with her. Most times, she let the small courtesy pass uncommented. Perhaps it was her growing despair or the aftermath of fear, but today she paused before him, tilted her head, and considered him.

Vincen Coe stood only just taller than she did, his darker eyes cast down only a degree to meet hers. His hair was the light brown of oak leaves in autumn. His jaw was perhaps a little too broad, his nose bent slightly from some long-healed break. This was her self-appointed protector, this huntsman trapped in the treeless paths of the city. He had stolen a kiss from her once, and it had tasted of blood. He’d sworn a kind of love for her, and she had dismissed it because it was ridiculous. And then she had sent him away, because perhaps it was growing less ridiculous.

And that odd, half-acknowledged attachment had saved her life again today.

“Why are you here?” she asked. The question had become something of a ritual between them, and his smile meant that he’d understood her. Why are you not off chasing some girl your own age? Why do you persist in wasting your own life in service to mine? How can I put so much trust in anything so clearly absurd?

“My lady,” he said, as he often did, “you saved me when I was lost, and I will follow you forever, if you let me.”

Clara shook her head impatiently, and Vincen smiled. A dark cart drawn by a black horse clattered by. A crow called out and another answered back, or else its echo. She took his arm, folding her own around it as an aunt might a favorite nephew.

“You are a child.”

“I’m older than Jorey.”

“Jorey is my son.”

“And wed.”

“So it’s not that you’re young, it’s that I’m old,” Clara said, laughing. “Lovely.”

“You’re more beautiful than most women half your age.”

After her mourning on the bridge, the flirtation was like a drink of sharp wine, cleansing and astringent with a thick aftertaste of guilt. Her husband wasn’t a full season dead. Her children were scattered to the winds, and her house was disgraced. Trading honeyed barbs with an infatuated young man, walking with her arm in his, was scandalous, low behavior, and a part of her soul cringed even as she did it. But another part swelled and stretched and unfurled.

Sometimes she felt she was two women at once. The grief-crippled widow who wept every night and forced a smile every morning was one, and she was undeniable in her sorrow. But in the heart of her disgrace and loss, there was another woman. Not a younger one, but one who had caught the scent of a freedom unlike any she’d ever known, and who was dreadfully hungry for it.

From the time she’d been old enough to put on a dress, she had been a woman of the noble class. Her path had been trod by generations, and led more or less to the same grave that held their dry bones. The world was disrupted now, broken, and she was no one. What scandal could touch her that would compare with what she already carried? Even if the highest names in the court saw her now, they would turn away and pretend they hadn’t. She had ceased to matter. Her actions and opinions were impotent, and so they could be anything. She was already fallen, and so she’d been freed.

It was an illusion, she knew. All actions carried consequences, even among the disgraced. But it was a convincing illusion, and it gave her hope that the world she had lost was not the only world there was.

“Can I …” Vincen said, his voice breaking into her reverie. She was surprised to see how far they had walked in silence and how close she had been holding his arm. “I’m sorry, m’lady, but can I ask?”

“I reserve the right to lie,” she said cheerfully, but the moment of light repartee was gone, and the words sounded hollow.

“Why are you here?” he asked. “What is it we’re doing?”

“Walking home before sunset for another bowl of your cousin’s somewhat purgatorial stew, I believe,” Clara said.

“Not that, ma’am. I mean that every day, we speak to people and find out what we can. Put together what’s happening in the city and in the empire like we’re tracking broken twigs and scat. But … well, but what is it you hope to do after?”

It was a powerful question, and one that Clara knew she’d avoided asking herself. Thus far, truly, she’d done nothing. To wander the city and make what connections she could was a benign occupation for a widow living on her son’s limited charity. To conspire against the throne … well, it had an air of danger and romance about it, but what precisely it meant was an open question.

In truth, she didn’t hate Geder Palliako. She had heard from her son Jorey of the burning of Vanai. She knew of Palliako’s thwarted impulse to kill the entire noble class of Asterilhold. She had listened to him slaughter her husband as a traitor, though she hadn’t had the strength to watch. If she had swallowed darkness and sworn revenge, no one could have argued that it hadn’t been earned. But she had also seen Palliako frightened and at sea among the young women at her son’s wedding. He had been at her side when the treachery of Feldin Maas had been exposed. She felt about him the way she did about fire or flood or a blight that took a season’s crop. He was merely a catastrophe. One might fear the flames even as one stood against them, but to hate them was absurd.

But what, then, was to be done?

“Tell someone, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. “Preferably someone in a position to do something about it. Surely there will be a dissenting group within the court that would—”

“Know and recognize you? Palliako’s sent his private guard for you once already.”

“He didn’t keep me,” Clara said, but the point was not lost on her. There had been others to go before Geder’s odd religious tribunal who had not been so fortunate. And the next time she might not be either. The winter sun slipped down behind the roofs and walls of Camnipol, the sky fading to a soft grey. The taprooms and coffee houses lit their lanterns, the sounds of music and song curling out to the streets, but even that seemed strained and martial. It would have been pretty to believe that the poison in the blood of Antea was only Geder Palliako, but if she were to be honest, she knew it had already spread. Her kingdom had caught a fever, and it would be years before it was well.

If she hoped to avoid that, she would need to be discreet. Happily, she’d been raised as a woman in the royal court where discretion, subtlety, and the tacit control of information were already something of a blood sport. Clara had never indulged in the destruction of another woman’s reputation herself, but she’d seen it done often enough. She had sometimes stepped in to mitigate campaigns waged against her or her friends and allies. This wasn’t so different.

When the intention was to undermine without being thought to do so, it was often wise to begin outside one’s normal circle and let the gossip travel in, though what that would mean in this case wasn’t perfectly clear. And anyone she did turn to would themselves need to be discreet, which was always a problem as so many people who came in possession of a secret seemed incapable of restraining the urge to brag about it …

The sound that came from her throat was low and brief, something between a laugh and cough, and it spoke of profound satisfaction.

“My lady?” Vincen Coe said.

“I’ll have an errand for you tomorrow. Find a courier headed for Northcoast who can accept an extra letter.”

“We have allies in Northcoast?”

She smiled and patted Vincen’s arm, but she didn’t answer, because there was no advantage in his knowing her intention. Discretion began at home.

Back at the boarding house, she spent a coin for three sheets of rag paper and thimble of ink. Paying for a courier would tax her allowance badly. She would be living on yesterday’s bread until the next handful of coin came from Jorey, but it couldn’t be avoided. She sat alone by the light of a candle, composing the letter in her mind for fear of wasting the paper.

Sir,

We have met, but I cannot think you would remember me. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer not to identify myself to you at this time. You have been represented to me as a man of both tact and influence, and for this reason, I wish to share with you some observations I have made concerning affairs in the city of Camnipol and also my concerns for what these observations portend.

To begin, the Lord Regent has, under the pretext of raising barracks for the guard, begun the construction of prisons within the city walls. I have reached that conclusion for the following reasons …

Even with her script tight, small, and as legible as she could achieve, she ran short of paper before things she wished to say. One fact flowed gracefully into another, each observation building on the ones before. She kept the tone calm and conversational, giving room for the reader to draw his own conclusions rather than impressing her own upon him in any but the most unobtrusive way. When she was finished, she sewed the edges herself, fixing the threads in a simple knot. She addressed the outermost face in a single line.

Paerin Clark, Medean Bank, Carse.