The Tyrant's Law

Geder




Well, you know how it is,” Geder’s father said, scratching at his belly. “Rivenhalm in winter. Spent a fair part of the season listening to the ice crack. Not a great deal more going on. Though this might amuse you, hey? You remember old Jeyup the weirkeeper? The one with the crooked nose?”

“Yes, of course,” Geder said, though the truth of it was that he had only a vague impression of a tall man with dark hair and an unfortunate voice. The room in which they sat now was less than halfway up the Kingspire, and still higher than any other tower in Camnipol. He’d thought that the view might impress his father, and perhaps it had. It was hard to tell.

“Well, just before thaw, he was out cutting ice away from the weir. Making repairs. Only he’d misjudged the ice. Fell right through, half died from the cold of it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Geder said, and glanced at the great spiral stair of rosewood dressed in gold that led to the floor above. The floor where Basrahip and his pet adventurer Dar Cinlama were meeting even now. He hoped to catch sight of the great priest as he descended, but the only form on the stairway was a servant in ceremonial robes trotting off on some errand or another. Geder leaned back in his seat.

“Don’t be,” his father said, “because that’s just the thing. Good came of it after all. The cunning man was away in the east seeing to a man who’d had a tree fall on him, so until he got back old Jeyup had Arrien, the butcher’s widow, coming to nurse him along. And they married at first thaw, if you can picture that!”

Geder’s father slapped his knee in merriment that invited Geder to join in. Geder did smile, pretending pleasure he didn’t actually feel. Rivenhalm had been his home for the whole length of his childhood and the early part of his time as a man, but the fine points of it seemed as vague as someone else’s memories. He remembered the weir and its keeper, the long path behind the manor house that led to the cave where he’d hide in the summer, the smell of the library, the small niche his father kept always lit by a single candle in memory of Geder’s mother, and those tiny fragments would be rich and full of meaning. But they had no context.

“So,” Geder’s father said, “tell me. What translations are you working on these days?”

“I’m not really,” Geder said. “You know. Being Lord Regent. Running the empire. The war makes it hard to have the time, really.”

Lehrer’s face fell a bit, and Geder felt he’d said the wrong thing.

“Of course,” his father said. “It’s just that it was so important to you when you were a boy. I hoped you’d be able … Well, that’s the world, isn’t it? We do what we have to do.”

A long, low, rolling laughter echoed in the distance. Basrahip. The urge to leap up from his seat and go up the stairs, the desire to know what had happened in the meeting was like an itch, but he also didn’t want to seem anxious. It would have been beneath his dignity, and he didn’t want Basrahip to laugh at him. He hated it when people did that.

“I’ve, ah, I’ve kept you too long,” his father said. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Geder said. “I’m always happy to see you. As long as I’m Lord Regent, you should come by the Kingspire anytime you like. I could get you rooms here.”

“My own rooms are fine,” Lehrer said. “They suit me.”

He levered himself to his feet and Geder rose with him. The older man looked frailer than Geder remembered, his hair thinner, his skin more ashen. It was just the winter, Geder told himself. With the summer sun and the court season to keep him busy, his father would get his color back. They stood for a moment, both of them unsure what etiquette demanded. At last, Lerer made a little bow appropriate for the Viscount of Rivenhalm to the Lord Regent, but with an ironic smile that meant for the father and son. Geder followed his example, and then watched as his father turned and walked away. He felt a lingering sense of having failed somehow. Of having disappointed. He shouldn’t have been thinking so much about Basrahip.

Basrahip. He glanced at the stairway, licked his lips, and started walking toward it, forcing his demeanor to be casual.

Basrahip and Dar Cinlama stood together under an archway of pale stone. The priest was speaking too quietly for Geder to make out the words, but his huge hands were gesturing, massaging the air. Cinlama nodded his understanding and agreement, the light from his eyes casting shadows across his cheekbones. The vastly large Firstblood man and the thin, muscular Dartinae looked like a woodcut, an allegory for something more than what they actually were.

“Well, then,” Geder said, walking up to them. “All the plans are made, then, yes?”

“Lord Regent,” Dar Cinlama said as he bowed. The amusement in the man’s voice was probably only Geder’s imagination.

“Yes, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said, putting his hand on the Dartinae man’s shoulder. “My friend Dar and I are quite pleased. Your generosity and wisdom will bring you great rewards from the goddess.”

Geder felt his smile curdle.

“That’s good,” he said. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

Cinlama made another little bow, but Basrahip frowned and Geder bit his lip. He shouldn’t have said anything. The falseness of the words would be clear as daylight to Basrahip. But then, Geder considered, that might have been why he’d said them.

“Forgive me, friend Dar,” Basrahip said. “I must speak with Prince Geder now.”

“No problem with that,” Dar Cinlama said, grinning happily. “I think the list of things I’ll need to prepare should keep me busy for days.”

He bowed to Geder a third time and then trotted away, self-congratulation radiating from him like heat from a fire. Basrahip’s wide face was a mask of concern. Geder crossed his arms.

“What troubles you, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked, gesturing that they should step into the meeting room that priest and explorer had just abandoned.

“All sorts of things,” Geder said. “The grain stores we’re capturing in Sarakal aren’t as rich as we’d expected. Ternigan’s saying the siege at Nus may take longer than he’d thought it would. I’ve got half a dozen decisions from the grand audience that I still need to do something about, and they’re just gnawing at me. It’s all just …”

Geder held his hand out, trying to express his frustration and the sense of loss that words could not quite encompass. It had all come so suddenly. The sense of being the most important man in the world had been wonderful, and it had been transitory. Geder couldn’t explain it precisely. It was as if everything had been fine before Dar Cinlama had made his petition, and then tasted of ashes afterward. He could no more justify it than deny it away.

He walked to the balcony and looked out over the massive city below him. It was his, for the time being at least. Camnipol was his, and Antea, and so, in a sense, was everything. It stretched out before him like a map of itself—the Division, the wide manors and compounds of the noble classes, the maze of narrow streets in the south. Even the sun high in its blue arch of sky seemed part of Geder’s domain. The air smelled of smoke from a thousand forges, bakeries, and hearths. Tiny shapes moved on the ground far below, distance reducing them all to less than ants. It should have been enough.

Basrahip’s footsteps approached from behind him. Like a boy poking his tongue at a sore tooth, he remembered again the pleasure and interest on the priest’s face when Dar Cinlama had made his proposal.

“I was thinking,” Geder said, “we should move your temple. The highest floors of the Kingspire aren’t being used for anything in particular, and there’s a beautiful theater space you could use for sermons. It looks out like you’re a bird. And then if something else like Dawson Kalliam happens, you’ll be safe. No one can take the Kingspire.”

Basrahip was silent for a long moment. His nod was hardly visible in the corner of Geder’s eye. The echo of disappointment and shame he felt could have been the echo of speaking with his father. It could have been something else.

“The meeting with the adventurer,” Geder said. “It went well, then? We’re going to do what he said.”

“I have asked that he give over all the information he has about places where the bones of the world may lie near its skin,” Basrahip said. “He has agreed. The man himself will lead one group, but there will be others to go where he feels it wise to send them. With your permission, Prince Geder.”

“Of course you have my permission. Why would you not? Here’s my permission. Take it.”

Beyond the southern wall of the city, the land fell away into a deep plain. From where he stood, it was almost as if Camnipol stood at the edge of the world. A flock of pigeons rose in the air below them, grey wings glittering white in the sunlight. Basrahip’s sigh carried the weight of years.

“What is troubling you, Prince Geder?”

“Nothing.”

“That is not true, my friend,” Basrahip said, his voice gentle. “Try again.”

Geder crossed his arms. Without meaning to, he picked out the tiny blot of color that was Yellow House. He wondered if Cary and Smit and the other players who’d hidden him and Aster were still there. He wondered if they had heard from Cithrin. He started to speak, stopped himself, and then tried again.

“This man Cinlama. He’s going to go off into the world and find things, isn’t he? He’s going to follow these tiny traces of history, these clues and rumors and half-remembered stories, and try to dig up wonders. I used to be the one who did that. I’m the one who left Antea and went looking for the Sinir Kushku and found the temple. I was the one who brought you and the goddess back out into the world. And now …”

“Do you fear that this man would take your glory? Your place in the goddess’s favor?”

Geder shook his head. “I could have Cinlama killed for any reason. For no reason other than that I said so. It’s that I see him and I think of the ways I used to be him. Or the way I used to be my father’s son, and I’m not anymore. Or the way I used to be Dawson Kalliam’s client before he turned on me. I used to be the one who led you into the world and showed you all the things that had changed since your people went into seclusion. And I’m not any of those people anymore.”

“Would you wish to be?” the priest asked. “Lord Prince, what do you want?”

The question seemed to float in the air like a feather. Geder tried to imagine himself strapping a leather sack of books to the side of a horse, taking a handful of servants, and pressing out into the forgotten corners of the world. In truth, he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the journey when he had gone, and the prospect of sleeping in a tent and worrying about where the next freshwater would be had more charm in theory than in practice. It wasn’t what Dar Cinlama was doing that Geder envied, it was what he signified. For a moment, Geder was suffering the summer just gone by, hiding in a hole under a collapsed building, spending days and nights in darkness with Aster and Cithrin bel Sarcour. He heard her laugh again and the slight bitterness that seemed to flavor everything she said.

“I want to matter,” Geder said.

“Ah,” Basrahip said, as if he understood.

There were, Geder supposed, things in the world that deserved his hatred more than ancient precedents of grazing rights. The worse sorts of stinging flies, for example. Or the way a man’s bowels turned to water if he ate bad meat. Those were worse, if only slightly.

“You see, my lord,” the scholarly man said, “the question you ask hinges on whether the men in question are grazing animals that come from the same stock. If, for example, they are sheep who descended from the same ram three generations previous, then they are by imperial standards within the same greater flock. In that case—”

“The old Miniean precedents apply, and this Sebinin fellow doesn’t owe the other one a single coin.”

“Exactly,” the scholar said, “but if there was another ram—”

“He owes a tenth of a sheep for every day he grazed on the land without permission.”

“Precisely. If you don’t mind my saying it, your lordship is very quick to understand the intricacies of these questions.”

Geder nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table like a schoolboy before his tutor. It was another of the unresolved issues of the general audience taken care of, or if not taken care of, at least moved to the next stage. He’d send a messenger to the people in question and find out the lineages of their sheep. He had never in all his life imagined that the role of governing an empire would cook down to such a thin broth as this, but he understood now why the general audience came only once a year and usually ended well before the last of the petitioners came before the throne. If he’d chosen to stop an hour or two earlier, he wouldn’t be sitting here now. Nor would Dar Cinlama and his team be preparing to depart. Around him, the small library held the least command of his attention that any collection of books had ever managed. Volume after volume, codex after codex, trailing back through centuries to the founding of Antea, and many older even than that, without a single one being particularly interesting. He wondered whether Basrahip’s disdain for the written word was beginning to seep into him, or if this was genuinely the least interesting subject known to humanity.

“All right,” Geder said and consulted the page of notes he had sketched for himself, his heart sluggish and grey. “Let’s see what’s next. How much do you know about the legal differences between spring lettuce and autumn?”

The scholar’s eyebrows rose as Geder’s heart sank.

“Well, my lord, that is a fascinating question.”

It isn’t, Geder thought. No, it really, truly isn’t …

“Lord Regent?” a familiar voice said from the doorway. Canl Daskellin stood uncertainly, hesitating to step in or to leave. Geder sprang to his feet.

“Lord Daskellin! Come in, please,” he said, and then turned to the scholar. “I’m afraid the rest will have to wait. War and all. I’ll send someone for you when there’s time.”

The scholar bowed his way out and Geder led Daskellin to a chair, only realizing when he got there that he’d been pulling at the older man’s sleeve like a puppy worrying a dog’s ear. Daskellin smiled as he sat, but his expression seemed abstracted. It was as if he were still making some internal argument and had not come to a conclusion that entirely satisfied him. The dusting of white at the man’s temples stood out against the darkness of his skin, making him seem older than he was.

“I’ve been … speaking with Minister Basrahip,” Daskellin said at last.

“Yes,” Geder said. “Did he tell you I’ve decided to move his temple into the Kingspire? There are all of those levels at the very top that no one ever seems to use, and since the old one was damaged last summer … along with everything else, I suppose. But that way, he’ll have a place that’s protected.”

“He’d mentioned it, yes,” Daskellin said, tapping his fingertips idly against the spine of a book on taxation precedent. “It wasn’t the meat of our meal, though. It’s the Lord Marshal.”

“Ternigan?”

“Not Ternigan, no. Not precisely,” Daskellin said. “More the role of the Lord Marshal in the larger sense. As an extension of the power of the throne.”

Geder tilted his head. Daskellin licked his lips, his gaze on the farther wall.

“The king, or in your case the man taking the king’s role, isn’t a leader in the field,” Daskellin said. “His place is to coordinate among his subjects, see to it that the nobility are unified and direct his will through them. Through us.”

“Of course,” Geder said.

“But,” Daskellin said, sitting forward, “the minister had a point about the present situation. About Nus, in particular. You’ve read Ternigan’s reports, I assume?”

“Of course.”

“Minister Basrahip suggested that if you were to join the Lord Marshal in the field—if you were to be physically present—it might rally the troops and end the siege sooner. And the sooner Nus falls, the more likely we are to recover food and supplies that … Well, we’re going to need them to make it through next winter, aren’t we?”

“You mean,” Geder said, his heart suddenly leaping within his chest, “you think I should go to the war? To Nus?”

Daskellin shook his head ruefully.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at first, but the minister kept repeating his arguments, and by the fourth or fifth time he’d said it all, it seemed to have some heft to it. It is critical that things go well in Sarakal, and Ternigan is a fine strategist. Only he isn’t … he isn’t a man who inspires the men around him. He isn’t a hero.”

“A hero?” Geder echoed, and he felt the smile not as an expression, but only a pressure at the back of his jaw. A bud that was growing into a bloom.

Thank you, Basrahip, he thought. This is what I wanted.





Clara




Disruption was, in its way, a constant. No season passed without its share of scandal. In a court the size and complexity of the one that attended the Severed Throne, someone was certainly being sexually unfaithful on a near-daily basis. Someone’s health was failing. Someone had delivered a deathly insult to someone. Really, if nothing else, someone would wear a jacket with an unfortunate cut or rouge their cheeks too much or else too little. Falling from grace, like anything else, had its protocol and its expectations. And, provided one didn’t fall too far, so did returning to court.

Allies would announce themselves by their invitations. The staunchest might invite the unfortunate soul in need of rescue to a dinner party or hold a luncheon in their name, but that was boldness that bordered on the rash. The more cautious might include the recently fallen into a sewing circle or private tea casual enough that the guests sat wherever they pleased. Even a nod or a smile in the street could be noticed by others and commented upon.

Clara’s misfortune, she knew, would be difficult to parse. Her husband, whom all in court knew she’d loved deeply and sincerely, had led the rebellion against the Lord Regent and been slaughtered. Attempted regicide should have been too dark a stain to recover from, but there were Jorey and Vicarian. Even, in her grudging way, Elisia. Each of them had kept some distance from the tragedy, and Geder Palliako had even kept Jorey in the court. Clara’s position, then, became something of a cipher. She was without precedent, and even the most experienced etiquette master might be permitted to confess puzzlement at how best to approach her.

The common sentiment appeared to be that sending a servant to her boarding house was a bit too sordid, and so slowly, as the groaning mechanisms of social play took their positions, notes began to arrive at Lord Skestinin’s small manor. Not invitations, because that would be almost a statement of allegiance, but mentions of small gatherings. Most were ostensibly for Sabiha with the understanding that she might choose to bring a guest. But there were a few addressed to Clara herself.

Lady Tilliaken’s gardens spilled out from her family’s manor house in an artful display of carelessness. To an untrained eye, the ivies and spoke-roses that curled around the stone walkways might have looked wild, but it was a tended wildness. The bright green runners never found their way into any inconvenient place. The buds of the flowers all came, as if by chance, into positions that would show their petals to the best effect. The finches and butterflies that found their way there hadn’t been drawn by any obvious caches of seed or sweet water. The style was called Hallskari, though Clara’s understanding was that real gardens in Hallskar were much more spare and put greater importance on the bitter herbs that Haaverkin seemed to prefer. The servant girl, a young Cinnae with hair as pale as daylight and eyes the color of ice, led Clara directly to the garden tables without bringing her through the house. The other women were already there, and it took Clara less than five long breaths together to assess the situation.

Lady Enga Tilliaken, at the head of the table, rose to greet Clara with kisses on both cheeks, which taken with the invitation put her as Clara’s ally. Merian Caot, second daughter of the Baron of Dannick, looked pleased and amused in equal measure much the way Clara’s own daughter might have done when she was young and going to inappropriate garden parties in order to play at rebellion. Lady Nikayla Essian, seeing Clara, gave a little coo of concern and rose to her feet, her eyes the perfect image of sympathy. She had come to gloat.

“Don’t get up on my account,” Clara said with a smile. “I don’t intend to stand for long. I’m too old for it.”

“You will take some tea, though, won’t you?” Lady Tilliaken said. “I’ve discovered this fascinating blend from that merchant from the Free Cities. What was his name?”

“Not the Timzinae!” Essian said.

“Of course not. The Jasuru woman.”

“Nufuz, you mean?” Clara said, and Tilliaken clapped her hands together.

“Yes, her.”

“If she recommended it, I can hardly refuse,” Clara said, taking a seat at the little stone table. A wasp hissed by her ear, gold and green as a gem in the sunlight. “I haven’t seen her in an age.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t have,” Essian said, touching Clara’s wrist. It promised to be a long and unpleasant afternoon.

It was necessary, of course. And more than that, it was expected. Dawson had thrown everything about her into question. The role she had played at court her whole life had been made uncertain, and now those who were willing to accept her company would be watching, testing, to see who and what she was. Did she show remorse, and if she did was it for her husband’s death or his actions? Did she speak harshly, or was she kind? In a hundred small ways, the Clara Kalliam they had all known was dead, and this new woman with her face and voice had stepped in. If she were ever to be reintegrated at court, they would need to know who this new woman was.

And, for that matter, so would she.

The tea was lovely—smoky and rich with a brightness that came from adding rose hips—and the cakes seemed to be made entirely of butter and honey with only enough flour to give them shape. The smell of turned earth from where Tilliaken’s servants were preparing the beds floated through the air like perfume, and the soft warmth of the spring sun slowly undid the stays at the necks of their dresses. Clara listened and spoke, doing the best imitation she could of the woman she had been only a year before, except she didn’t smoke. She’d run out of money for tobacco, and she would not allow herself to ask for it.

“Oh, did I tell you about my son’s new commission?” Essian said. “It’s very exciting. His first command.”

“Command?” Clara said. “Is he joining the forces in Sarakal?”

Essian’s cheeks pinked slightly, and not, Clara thought, from pride. That was interesting.

“No, it’s a smaller force. Bound for Lyoneia. Fifty men, he said.”

Clara felt something deep within her wake, tilt its ears forward, narrow its eyes. Why is he going there? What is he doing? Had Palliako given the order, or had someone else, and if someone else, who? She wanted to interrogate Essian the way Palliako had once questioned her. Instead she sipped her tea and nodded.

“It’s a great honor,” Essian said, almost petulantly.

“Command is always an important thing,” Caot said with a thin smile. Why was it that the young were so adept at being cruel? “It’s only a pity he’s being sent so far south when Sarakal’s to the east. He must be disappointed.”

“I don’t see why he would be,” Clara said. “If the Lord Regent’s sending him so far, it does imply a certain trust, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, trust,” Essian said, leaping at the word. “The Lord Regent trusts him.”

“Sending him as far as Lyoneia,” Clara said. “And I have to assume that it’s a matter of some importance. Surely we wouldn’t be sending men away in wartime unless the matter were critical.”

Essian sipped her tea, but didn’t answer. Either it was something trivial or else she didn’t know what the errand was. Clara wished she could think of some way to draw the woman out. Better to be patient and not be seen to ask. Better to seem to be what they thought she was. Clara suppressed a small and frustrated growl.

“So,” she said, “since I have been somewhat away from the center of things, you must tell me about the dresses at the opening of the season. Did Ana Pyrellin wear that impressive fur of hers again?”

“The one with the heads still on?” the young Caot girl said, laughing. “She did, and worse. You won’t believe it.”

Clara let the conversation drift into safer waters. The afternoon was brief enough. Had she remained until twilight, it would have been taken quite differently in court. Small steps would get her where she wanted to be more swiftly than great strides. They spoke of Geder Palliako’s decision to inspect the troops in Sarakal, of the rise in status of Fallon Broot, of the great debate about whether to replace the chairs in the Fraternity of the Great Bear. Clara listened and offered perhaps a bit less comment than she would have before. She felt the two different versions of herself sitting together, one hurt and shamed and cast out from her home, the other listening carefully for scraps of information that might give her advantage. When the time arrived, Caot and Essian left together, but Lady Tilliaken kept Clara back, inviting her to a small niche for a moment. She was still not welcome in the house even so far as a withdrawing room, but that Tilliaken wished a moment alone was interesting. Clara sat on the wooden bench while the lady of the house disappeared for a moment. She reached for her pipe before remembering that she couldn’t make use of it.

“Clara,” Lady Tilliaken said, stepping into the niche. She carried a folded cloth of yellow cream. “I wanted to ask if you had any need of this. It’s perfectly serviceable, but I’m afraid it doesn’t fit me any longer.”

The dress spilled forth from her hands, flowing like water. Clara felt herself go cold. It was a pretty enough piece of sewing, strong at the seams and the lacework well crafted. That wasn’t at issue. It was the offer itself. The fact—for it was now a fact—that the Baroness of Osterling Fells had become the sort of woman one offered secondhand clothes to. She wished now that she’d asked for the tobacco. If she had descended to charity, there seemed no reason to step away. She forced a smile.

“It’s lovely, Enga,” Clara said, taking the silk between her fingers. “And I have the perfect use for it.”

No, ma’am, I can’t,” the woman said. Her name was Aly Koutunin, and Clara had met her on the Prisoner’s Span the month before when Clara had gone to pass out free bread. She was younger than Clara by almost a decade, but the years had worn harder on her, and they might almost have been sisters.

“Your daughter’s getting married, isn’t she?” Clara asked. “She’s almost the right size. Even if she doesn’t choose it for the ceremony—”

“Not that. It’s just so rich.”

“If you don’t take it, it will be on the ragman’s cart by morning.”

“No!”

“I swear it,” Clara said, and her sincerity left no more room for dissent. Aly folded the cloth carefully, reverently, and pressed it into her sack. They stood at the edge of the Prisoner’s Span, looking out across the southernmost reach of the Division. In the west, massive clouds were building, high and white at the top, grey as slate at the bottom. Late spring storms often washed the lands near Camnipol this time of year, but just as often they missed, clinging to the horizon like a shy boy at a his first ball. On the bridge itself, a Firstblood man was leaning over the railing, shouting down to a woman in one of the hanging cages. From what little Clara could see, the prisoner’s expression was empty, her arms and legs poking out between the bars and over the abyss. The man shouted something about being a bad mother to her children and spat down toward her.

“True love, eh?” Aly said, following Clara’s gaze. “They’ve been like that most of the day.”

“And how is your Mihal faring?” Clara asked.

“He’ll come back up in three days, unless the magistrate’s too drunk to come,” Aly said. Mihal, her son, had been caught stealing coins from a merchant’s stall and had hung over the open air for two weeks now. It wasn’t his first time in the cages, and the magistrate had made unpleasant jokes about sending him over without one next time. Aly pretended to treat it lightly, but Clara saw the fear at the corners of her eyes.

The previous year’s battles had wounded the city, there was no question. Blades in the street and fires in the noblest quarters. Nothing like that could happen without leaving a mark. Only in the gardens and mansions at the northern end of the city did Clara see how it could be possible to view the worst as passed, the wounds as healing. Walk south and west far enough to reach the Prisoner’s Span, and the infection showed. It wasn’t only that there were more beggars, though certainly there were. It wasn’t only the merchants’ stalls closed and abandoned.

Palliako’s war against Asterilhold had taken the able-bodied men from the farms in planting, and the insurrection against him had distracted the noblemen from the business of managing their holdings. Now the armies fought in Sarakal, and another spring planting had almost passed with fewer hands than it needed. There was still bread at the bakers, meat at the butchers, beets and carrots at the carts along the streets, but there was also the growing sense that all the reserves had been spent. It felt like desperation, and it showed the most in the city’s desperate places—the Prisoner’s Span, the vagrant encampments that clung to the sides of the Division, Palliako’s new prisons. The places that had been beneath her notice and were no longer.

To her left, Vincen was talking to a thin older man. He glanced toward her then away, reassuring himself that she was still there, still well, in a way that could only remind her of a hunting dog checking on its pack.

“What’s happened to Oldug?” she asked, taking her pipe out from her pocket.

“Hauled him up early,” Aly said, bitterness in her voice.

“Hardly seems fair, does it? My boy in for taking a few bits of copper and staying his full time. Oldug was running his ship from Hallskar and back for five years before they put hands on him. Must have cost a hundred times what my boy did.”

“Is odd, isn’t it? What’s become of him since?”

“Not around here. Likely took his good fortune back to sea with him.”

“Or got pressed into service for the war,” Clara said.

“Or that.”

Clara took her tobacco pouch out before she remembered again that it was empty. She pressed it back, but Aly plucked the clay pipe out of her hand and started filling it from her own supply. Clara began to protest, but then stopped. It was rude to ask, but it was worse to refuse. A young man of status given a small command to Lyoneia. A smuggler shown leniency. The feeling it called forth in her was little more than a slight discomfort, an itch, but Clara sat with it patiently, and it grew into something larger and more complex. Suspicion, perhaps. Aly lit the pipe from her own match, drawing on it until blue smoke billowed from her lips, then passed it back to Clara. The leaf was old and stale-tasting, but after a few days of nothing it might as well have been ambrosia and incense. Clara puffed out a careful ring of smoke and watched it spin and diffuse while she thought.

“If you hear what happened to him, I would be interested,” she said. “Anyone else who’s been let out early and then gone too.”

“I’ll ask around if you’d like,” Aly said, leaning against the great stone abutment that gave the bridge its strength. “Anything else you’d want to know?”

Of course there was. She’d already gathered so much from so many places—the knights in the field from an old porter who had taken a position at the Fraternity of the Great Bear; the grain and fodder being diverted to the army from a disgruntled baker arguing with the miller who usually supplied him flour; the movements of the army from a dozen friends, lovers, and relatives of the soldiers. It was all there, floating through the city waiting only for a careful listener. But like drinking saltwater and growing thirsty, every question answered left her curious. What kinds of supplies were going south to Lyoneia with Nikayla Essian’s son. What other commands were being scattered to the odd places of the world and who was leading them. Whose sons they were taking with them, how many horses, and how much food. Her curiosity was piqued, and it would be days or weeks finding what she wanted to know, all of which might amount to nothing. She smiled at Aly and drew another sip from her pipe. Was there anything else she’d want to know? Only everything.

“No, dear,” she said. “Just an old woman feeding her idle fancies.”

“Not so old as that,” Aly said and cast a leering glance at Vincen Coe. Clara felt a moment’s stab of embarrassment, and then laughed. Across the little square, Vincen turned to look over his shoulder at them, checking in with his pack.

“He is pretty to look at,” Clara said.

They stayed there for the better part of an hour, Clara visiting and trading gossip with men and women she had come to know over the last months and Vincen following her lead. At last, the sun began to reach down toward the western wall of the city, and Vincen came to take her arm and lead her home to the boarding house.

“We should talk,” he said as they stepped into the shadowed alleyway. “I’m starting to get worried about staying in the city. I’d like to speak to my uncle about going out there for the summer.”

“That’s sweet,” Clara said. “No.”

“I’m afraid there’s going to be more trouble. Not right away, but soon.”

“All the more reason I should stay,” Clara said.

“It would be safer if—”

“I’m sure the letters I wrote from your uncle’s farmstead would be fascinating,” Clara said. “‘There may be more piglets this year than expected.’ No, if I’m going to do this, I have to do it from here.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t do it,” Vincen said. His voice was so gentle she almost laughed.

“Of course I’m going to continue with it. It’s what I have left.”

“You have me.”

This time she did laugh, and the flicker of hurt on his face was terrible and hilarious both. She leaned up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. The taste of his sweat was surprising and immediate, and Clara wondered whether she’d just crossed some unspoken boundary. And if she had, whether the boundary was his or her own. Vincen’s light brown eyes were fixed on hers, his cheeks flushed. She didn’t realize they’d stopped walking until someone passed them.

“My work’s here,” she said. “But I hope you’ll stay with me.”

“To avenge your husband,” Vincen said, and she could hear the complexity of sentiment in his words.

She shook her head and pressed two fingers to the huntsman’s lips. “To redeem my country,” she said. And then, a moment later, “By betraying it.”