“Yes, I am a small, petty woman,” she said, “and I mourn for the dead and the suffering, but I really wanted to get my own damn clothes back. Can you reach Paerin, or is he as guarded as the priest?”
“He’s not taking visitors he doesn’t know,” Mikel said.
“All right,” Cithrin said. “I’ll need something to write on.”
The company cipher was still clear in her mind, and the note was a brief one: Have access to Lord Regent and Prince Aster. What questions do I ask? Reply by same courier. She considered adding something that would say where she was, where Geder and Aster were, and she didn’t. If he wanted Geder and Aster, he could come to her.
It was one of the great and powerful lessons of finance. The key to wealth and power was simple enough to state and difficult to employ: be between things. Narinisle was a chilly island with barely enough arable land to support its own population and no particular resources to offer, but the currents of the Ocean Sea put it between Far Syramys and the rest of the continent. And so it was vastly wealthy. Now Cithrin had fallen into Narinisle’s position, and while it wouldn’t last, she could gain more the longer she remained in place.
“All right,” she said, handing the paper to Mikel. “I’ll come back as soon as I can for the reply.”
“How are things going underground?” Cary asked.
“Frightened and bored and ready to be done with this. But we let Aster sneak up to the mouth and look out at the daylight. It seems to help.”
“Good. When this is over, though, I hope the Lord Regent remembers who his friends are. I’m almost through all the stones the prince brought with him.”
“Really?”
“I could buy more with a ripe orange than with one of those pearls,” Cary said. “It’s already starvation time in some quarters. If this all doesn’t break soon, we’ll start seeing a lot more people dying. And they won’t be lords and nobles falling in glorious battle.”
When there was nothing more to be said, Cithrin pulled a sack over her shoulder with four fresh wineskins, a palmsized round of hard cheese, a bottle of water, some stale bread, and a double handful of dried cherries harvested at least a year before and hard as pebbles. She paused before she started the walk back, looking out over the Division.
The air was hazy, the far side of the span already a bit greyer than things closer to hand. Nothing was burning at the moment, but there was no reason to expect that would be true through the night, for instance.
She hadn’t been there for a half a season, but Camnipol had gone from the heart of an empire to a city of scars. It was in the scorch marks on the buildings and the faces of the men she passed in the streets, the empty market squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could play the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.
On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.
At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.
The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.
“Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.
Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.
“It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”
“The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”
“Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.
“It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”
“We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to stop.”
“The dragons, I mean,” Geder said. “Here, look.”
Cithrin came and sat beside them as Geder drew out the problem fresh. Morade was a dot in the center, his clutchmates were set one on either side. And three stones were the places Drakkis Stormcrow might be hiding: Firehold, Matter, and Rivercave. The puzzle gave each of the dragons rules on how they could move and in which order, and the puzzle was to find how Morade could check all three hiding places while blocking his clutch-mates.
“What if Stormcrow’s in the first one?” Cithrin asked.
“No, you don’t ever find him,” Geder said. “It’s only to look in all three places.”
“What if…” Aster reached for the little improvised board and tried a series of moves that didn’t work. Cithrin left them to it, opening the pack and putting everything out where she could locate it again by touch. The candle wasn’t going to last all the way to nightfall. Not that day or night meant much in the darkness.
They ate their dinner in darkness, and Aster crawled up through the dark tunnel to watch the sunset fade at the bottom of the ruined warehouse. Cithrin sat against a wall of stone and earth, her wineskin in her hand. Geder, invisible, was before her and to the right.
“Do you think they really all died?” she asked.
“Who? The dragons? Of course they did.”
“I went to the Grave of Dragons before I came out here. The man I was with was saying that Stormcrow would put pods of them to sleep, hide them away so that they would wake behind enemy lines and attack from the rear.”
“I’ve read about that,” Geder said. “They had ships too that would carry people into the sky. They had spines of steel and knife blades as long as a street. They’d fight dragons with them.”
“Did they ever win?”
“I don’t think so,” Geder said. “If they did, I never read about it.”
“When I was a girl, I dreamed about riding dragons. Having one as a friend who could carry me up and away from Vanai and everyone I knew. Everything. I had these elaborate stories about how it would obey me and let me do whatever I wanted. And then…” She laughed, shaking her head though no one could see it.
“What?” Geder asked.
“And then the dragon turned out to be money,” she said. “Coin and contract and lending at interest were what let me fly. Who would have thought that was what I meant by dreaming of dragons?”
“It makes sense,” Geder said. “I mean, it wasn’t really gold either. Dragons or coins or riding off with an army at your back and a crown on your head. It’s all the same. It’s power. You wanted power.”
Cithrin sat with the thought for a moment.
“Did you want power?” she asked.
“Yes,” Geder said. She heard him shifting his weight in the earth. “I wanted to see everyone who laughed at me suffer for it. I wanted every humiliation answered for.”
“And now that you have the power, you’re living in a ruin that stinks of cat piss and eating whatever an acting company can scrounge for you,” Cithrin said. “I’m not sure the plan is going well.”