“I see.”
“We have disagreed profoundly on some issues, but your husband and I have always been loyal to the Severed Throne,” Issandrian said. “I didn’t want to bring Asterilhold into the conflict any more than he courted Northcoast. But like him, I wasn’t working alone. And I…”
“And you see Sir Klin being given the chance to redeem his name while you are kept in Camnipol,” Clara said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I don’t take part in those decisions or discuss them with Dawson.”
“If you could ask… Just ask—”
“Sound out my husband on your behalf?” she asked with a smile. “Gather information and report it back to you? You can’t think that.”
Issandrian paled, and then chuckled ruefully.
“You make it sound more than it is,” he said.
“No, I only see the same thing from another angle,” she said. “I will tell my husband you came, and what we said. I will tell him you seemed sincere because you do. And if he wishes to converse with you about this, I won’t argue against it.”
“Baroness Osterling, I could ask nothing more.”
“You could ask,” she said. “But you couldn’t have it. And now I must ask that you go. I have family here.”
Issandrian practically sprang to his feet, his face and voice rich with apology.
“I hadn’t known that, my lady, or I wouldn’t have intruded. I owe you even greater thanks, it seems. If I can ever be of service to you, only let me know.”
“Lord Issandrian?” she said. He paused. “My husband hates you, but he respects you as well. It isn’t so bad a position to be in.”
Issandrian nodded soberly and made his exit. Clara walked back out toward the garden slowly. Her impression from Dawson’s letters was that Sir Klin wasn’t at all enjoying his time winning back his honor. And, in fact, that Palliako had gone out of his way to make the poor man’s time in the field as hellish as possible. She wondered whether she should write to Dawson about this or wait for his return.
In the garden, Elisia and the nurse were still by the pond, splashing and playing. Sabiha sat alone at the table. Clara’s pipe was in the girl’s hand.
“Where did you find it?” Clara asked, taking the little clay bowl and stem from the girl’s hand. There was already a hard wad of tobacco stuffed into it, ready for the fire.
“In your withdrawing room,” Sabiha said. “Just as you thought. I’ve been listening to your grandson. He’s a beautiful child.”
“He is. Takes after his mother that way. She was always a pretty child, even when she was growing half a hand a year and looked like a blade of grass come to life, she wore it well. And he doesn’t sleep any more than she did. I’ll tell you a secret. Watching your children struggle with the same things you did when they were babes is a grandmother’s revenge.”
Sabiha smiled. It wasn’t obvious that she’d been weeping. Only a little redness about the eyes and a tiny, fading blotchiness at the throat. The girl was lucky that way. Being able to hide tears was a gift. But now a fresh shining came to her. Clara pursed her lips.
“Sometimes,” Sabiha said, “and it isn’t often, but sometimes I think of how the world could have been if I hadn’t been Lord Skestinin’s daughter.”
“Ah, but you always were,” Clara said, trying to keep the girl from going down the path she was headed. The girl wouldn’t be turned.
“I know. It’s just there are freedoms women have when they aren’t what we are. There are struggles too, I understand that. But there are ways to shape a life even within those, and then maybe—”
“No,” Clara said.
Sabiha’s tears welled, but did not fall. Not yet.
“No,” Clara said again, more gently. “You can’t think of that child. You can’t even wish for him back. It isn’t fair to ask everyone else to forget and only you remember. It doesn’t work like that.”
“I miss him, though,” Sabiha whispered. “I can’t just stop missing him.”
“You can stop showing that you do. Jorey has risked a great deal to give you another life. Another beginning. If you didn’t want it, you should have refused him. Accepting him and also keeping hold of the past isn’t fair. And it isn’t wise.”
“I’m sorry,” Sabiha said, her voice thick. “He was my boy. I thought you would understand.”
“I do. And that’s why I’m saying this. Look up. Look at me. No, at me. Look at me. Yes.”
Sabiha swallowed, and Clara felt the beginnings of tears in her own eyes. There was a boy out there—a child—whose mother loved him enough to break her heart, and he would never know it. Perhaps it was fair to the girl. She’d at least made a decision, even if the punishment seemed too much for the lapse. But the child was blameless. He was blameless, and he would suffer, and Clara would do what she could to see that the estrangement between mother and son was permanent, and that Sabiha’s old scandals were all kept in the past where they belonged. A tear tracked down Sabiha’s cheek, and Clara’s matched it.
“Good,” Clara said. “Now smile.”
Cithrin
The last Dragon Emperor slept before her. Each jade scale was as wide as her open palm. The eyelids were slit open enough to show a thin sliver of bronze eye. The folded wings were as long as the spars of a roundship. Longer. Cithrin tried to imagine the statue coming to life. Moving. Speaking in the languages that had made the world.
On one hand, the bulk and beauty and implicit physical power of the thing was humbling. The claws could have ripped a building apart. The mouth, had it opened, would have fit a steer. But size alone didn’t define it. The sculptor had also managed to capture a sense of the intellect and rage and despair in the shape of the dragon’s eyes and the angle of its flanks. Morade, the mad emperor against whom his clutch-mates had rebelled. Morade, whom Drakkis Storm-crow schemed against. Morade, whose death was the emancipation of all the races of humanity.
At her side, Lauro Medean scratched his arm.
“They say that the dragons could sleep as long as stone when they wanted to,” he said. “It was part of the war. The dragons would bury themselves or put themselves in deep caves. Hidden. And then when the armies had their back or flank, the dragons would spring back to life. Come boiling up out of the ground. Slaughter everybody.”
Komme Medean’s son was a year older than her, but he acted much younger. He shared his father’s brown skin and dark hair, and when she looked carefully, she could see where the young man’s face would broaden, his jowls sink, and he would look even more like Komme. She wondered how old a man had to be before gout took him. He smiled at her.
“You want to go inside?”
“I’ve come a long way not to,” she said.
Coming to Carse, the thing she’d worried about least was the journey. Bandits, pirates, illness, wildcats. She knew of them all, and understood the risks of them better than most. Her work from childhood had been to understand risk. In a journey of a thousand miles taken by a hundred ships, about how many would be lost. In summer. In winter. Along the coast. Crossing the blue water to Far Syramys. How often caravans were killed or simply vanished. The actuarial tables were in her mind, and more than that the tools with which the tables were built. She could estimate chance better than a gambler, and so the journey held no terror.
The handing over of the reports had been worse. She knew that the branch was doing well, but not what would be well enough, or what the other branches were doing, or how her improvised branch in Porte Oliva affected the greater strategies of the holding company. It wasn’t risk that frightened her, but the inability to figure it, to place a number against it. To be unknown was worse than to be dangerous.