As part of her bargain, Cithrin had surrendered all the leverage she had over the bank. If Pyk sent a message back to Carse saying that Cithrin was a liability to the bank, Cithrin had nothing that would keep them from separating her from the business. She broke off a crust of bread, chewing on it absently. It could have been spiced with dirt for all the pleasure she took in it. Yardem pointed at the plate, and she pushed it toward him. He pinched a corner from the cheese and popped it into his mouth. They chewed in silence for a long moment. The fire murmured in its grate. From the alley, a dog yelped.
“I have to go tell him,” Cithrin said, then took another long drink.
“Company? I’m stood down for the day.”
“He won’t get violent,” Cithrin said. “He isn’t like that.”
“Could offer moral support. Encouragement.”
Cithrin laughed once, mirthless.
“That’s why I’m drinking,” she said.
“I know.”
She looked over at him. His eyes were deep brown, his head broad. He had a scar just under his left ear she’d never noticed before. Yardem had been a priest once, before he’d been a sellsword. The beer sat in its tankard. One wouldn’t do much. Two would leave her feeling looser and less upset. But it would also tempt her to reach for a third, and by the fourth she’d be ready to postpone the unpleasant until tomorrow. Better, she thought, to end it quickly and sleep without dreading it in the morning.
She pushed the tankard back, and Yardem stood to let her up.
The boarding house was in the middle of the salt quarter, not far from the little rooms Cithrin, Yardem, and Marcus Wester had hidden in during their first days in the city. The salt quarter streets were narrow and twisted. In some places, the streets were so narrow that Cithrin’s fingertips could have brushed the buildings on both sides. Everything stank of raw sewage and brine. By the time they reached the whitewashed walls and faded blue windows of the house, the hem of her dress was black and her feet cold and aching. She pulled her shawl closer about her shoulders and went up the two low steps to the common door. Yardem leaned against the wall, his expression empty but his ears high. Cithrin knocked.
She had hoped that someone else would answer. One of the other boarders or the man who kept the house. Something that would postpone the actual conversation for another minute or two. Luck wasn’t with her. Or, more likely, he’d been perched by the door, waiting for word from her. His ash-grey skin and the oversized black eyes of his race made him seem childlike. His smile was bright and tentative at the same time.
“Magistra Cithrin,” he said, as if her appearance were a delightful surprise. Her heart thickened. “Please come in. I was just making tea. Have some, have some. And your Tralgu friend.” Cithrin looked back at Yardem. She thought there was pity in his expression and she wasn’t certain who it belonged to.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“I’ll be right here,” he rumbled.
The common sitting room smelled damp despite the little stove that kept the air almost uncomfortably warm. The high, wailing voice of a colicky child forced its way from somewhere in the back, even when the doors were shut. Cithrin sat on a cushioned bench with lank tassels of red and orange that had probably been beautiful once.
“I’m pleased to see you,” the Southling man said. “I’ve been writing to my son in Lyoneia, and I just got a message back. He said that he could—”
“Before we—”
“—have a full shipment as early as midsummer. Last year’s nuts are dried and ready to grind. He said they smell like flowers and smoke. He was always good with words that way. Flowers and smoke. Don’t you think?”
He knew then. Or guessed. The words flowed out of him, pushing hers back. As if he could keep the inevitable at bay. Cithrin remembered being at the seashore sometime when she’d been very young. Maybe even before her parents had died. She knew what it was like to try stopping a wave with your hands.
“The bank can’t move forward with this plan,” Cithrin said. “I’m very sorry.”
The man’s mouth kept working, trying to bring out new syllables. His brows shifted, rising in the center and falling at the ends until he looked like the caricature of loss and disappointment. Cithrin forced herself to take a breath. Her stomach hurt. When he spoke, his voice was small.
“I don’t understand, Magistra.”
“I’ve had some new information arrive, unrelated to our conversations, and I’m afraid at the moment it isn’t possible for the bank to move forward with the loan you would need.”
“If, if, if I could just read you the letter my son sent me, Magistra. You see, we could—”
The man swallowed, closed his massive eyes and hung his head.
“Can I ask why not?”
Because you’ve got the wrong eyes, Cithrin thought. Because my notary won’t let me. I’m as sorry about this as you. I think you’re right. She thought all the things she couldn’t say, because they would mean admitting that she was ruled by Pyk Usterhall. If that became public knowledge, the last bit of influence she had over her bank would be gone. So instead she hardened her soul and pretended to be a banker who was working her own will, and who had the power to match her responsibilities.
“You know I can’t divulge other people’s conversations with me,” she said. “Any more than I would disclose our discussions to them.”
“No. Of course not,” he said and opened his eyes. “Is there any chance you might reconsider?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said, every word costing her.
“All right. Thank you, then. Did—did you still want some tea?”
I’m not drunk,” Cithrin said.
“You aren’t,” Yardem agreed.
“Then why can’t I have another glass?”
“Because that’s how you stay not drunk.”
They hadn’t gone back to the taproom. That was where Cithrin went to have meals and polite company. She didn’t want those. She wanted to scream and curse and break things with a stick. Frustration and impotence were like a thin iron cage, and she was a finch beating itself to death against them. Her own rooms were above the bank’s office and had been since before there had been a bank. It had been a gambler’s stall when she’d first walked up the steps. And she’d shared it with Yardem and Marcus Wester and a cartful of crates loaded with silk and gems, tobacco and jewels, and the wax-sealed account books more precious than all the rest put together. Now it held her bed, her desk, her wardrobe. Where there had been bare boards, she’d put a thick red rug to keep her feet warm in winter. A painting hung on the wall over her bed with the mark of the Medean bank worked together with the sigil of Porte Oliva. It had been a gift from the governor.
Cithrin rose from her table, pacing. Voices rose from below them, reminding her how thin the floor was and how sound could travel. There were always guards in the office, making sure that no one could reach the strongbox set in stone beneath the building. It held the hard reserves of the bank. But the real wealth was in the paper—loan agreements, partnerships, depositors’ contracts—that were no longer even in the office. They were a long block to the south in the rooms that Pyk had taken for herself, the secret base of the bank.
“She’s gutted me,” Cithrin said. “She’s taken it all.”
“That was the agreement,” Yardem pointed out.
“I don’t care what the agreement was,” Cithrin said, fighting to keep her voice—even the tone of it—from leaking to the ears of the guards below her. “It’s not just that she disagrees with me. Or that she condescends. She’s making bad choices, Yardem. She’s walking away with coins still on the table. And she’s doing it because she’s too proud to take direction from an underage half-Cinnae girl.”