“I think you’re asking if I played the priest of the goddess the whole journey. Have I understood you?”
“Have.”
“I could not,” Kit whispered. “I like to think I tried as best I could. I didn’t reveal who we truly are or our relationship to Cithrin or the bank. Or Palliako, for that. I didn’t lay bare the truth of what the spiders are or how these men’s lives were spent on a deceit. But there are things I cannot agree to do.”
“If you couldn’t stand lying to them, the time to say that would have been before we left Carse. We were counting on you. And you don’t get to change that horse midstream.”
“Them? It wasn’t them. It was me.”
“Don’t know what that means, Kit.”
“Each of them, I spoke to each of them every… I don’t know. Two days? Three? I started in the mornings and I played my part until it was time to sleep again. Even in the pass. Even then. They heard me a bit. On occasion. I was never free of my voice.”
“You’re not getting clearer.”
“I began to believe again,” Kit said. “I said that the goddess would save us. That we would win through. That all would be well, and I found myself taking real comfort in it. Once I saw that, I felt I had to change. Give them encouragement, but not… not the kind I had been giving.”
Marcus felt a little twist in his belly. A drop of horror in his sea of weariness. “Knowing what you know and seeing what you’ve seen, you fell back into believing in the spider goddess?”
Kit was silent for a long moment. A breath of wind stirred the grit and dirt. Salt and copper haunted the back of Marcus’s tongue.
“I don’t believe we are fighting cynics, Marcus. When I see my old brothers, I don’t see men manipulating innocents. I see men who have listened to their own stories until who they might have been was eaten away to nothing. I think they wear the goddess like a blindfold and swing their knives on faith. I believe I am as vulnerable to the power of my voice as anyone else, and I felt myself falling prey to the words I spoke. I’m sure that what I knew protected me, but it would wear away given time. Here and now, I want you to see how badly I wish the world free of these things. I hope you understand that I have been fighting against this power longer than anyone else I know. Longer than most of you even knew this danger existed.”
“I understand.”
“I find that unless we are very, very careful there can be a difference between who we are and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I hope I have managed to bring those two together as nearly as I could, and if I have, it was hard work with terrible prices paid along the way. I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but taking apart what I actually am and what I only believe myself to be?”
“Yeah. All right,” Marcus said.
“I would rather die than that,” Kit said.
“If you turned back into one of them, I’d kill you.”
Kit’s eyes went a little wider, his face paled under the leather and burn of his cheeks. The truth of what Marcus said carried a deeper weight than the glib way he’d said it. No one but Kit and his twice-damned spiders would have heard it.
“Thank you,” Kit said. “I appreciate that.”
Marcus didn’t have the advantage of the spiders, but he was fairly certain Kit wasn’t lying.
Cithrin
Years before, in another lifetime, Cithrin had been part of a caravan attacked by robbers. They’d been stopped by a tree across the dragon’s jade of the road. Before they could clear it, bandits had come from the sides and behind. The plan Cithrin hatched now wasn’t precisely the same but neither was it so very different. There were only a few scraps of information she needed.
The inn sat at the intersection of a dirt track and the dragon’s road. Yardem had done the negotiations with the keep, pretending to have less coin than they actually had and haggling for a place in the stables where they would be seen by fewer people. The grooms and stable hands, he was more open with, passing them enough silver that most of them found their way to the common rooms here or else other places nearby.
For the players, it was like coming home. With the exception of Lak, who had never been touring with Cary and Master Kit and the others, the stables of inns and taprooms were nearly like a mother’s hearth. Hornet and Mikel immediately made friends with the horses, cooing and passing them bits of dried apple. Charlit Soon and Cary scouted the place, finding where they could all sit in relative warmth and privacy, and also where the women could sleep apart from the men and so lower the chance of a local boy’s taking the wrong idea. Yardem took it all with the same stoic amusement that seemed to follow him like a cloud. Only Barriath seemed out of place.
Well, Barriath and her.
Cithrin had to keep out of sight. She’d spent the whole journey down from the icy coast to Rivenhalm wrapped in a colorless woolen cloak and hood, trying not to be noticeable and feeling as unobtrusive as blood on a wedding dress. A half-Cinnae woman in Antea would suggest only one name to the townsfolk. Cithrin bel Sarcour was, after all, the slut and daughter of lies who’d humiliated the Lord Regent and aided the filthy Timzinae in their plots against the empire. It gave her more attention than any banker would want. Her best defense was that a woman of that stature and power would never be so stupid as to travel the back roads with only a handful of actors, a single guard, and an exile and traitor whom Geder had ordered killed if found inside his borders. If she had been able to trust the work to anyone else, she wouldn’t have come.
Except that wasn’t true. This was better than sitting quietly in Carse, waiting for word to come. And if it was a problem, at least it was hers. It was better to be damned for what she was.
Charlit Soon’s giggle came from the yard, and a boy’s rough voice trying to be deeper than it was. The other players went quiet, holding their conversation until they knew the results of her mission. She squealed and laughed and then her shadow came through the stable door alone. The boy’s footsteps were almost too quiet to hear, even before he retreated.
Charlit’s round face glowed.
“He’s at his holding,” she said. “Apparently Lord Lehrer Palliako isn’t what you’d call a fixture at court, even if his son does run it.”
“Could have told you that,” Barriath said, with a scowl. “Wait. I did tell you that. More than once.”
“You didn’t say he was at home just now,” Sandr pointed out with feigned mildness. The two men had been needling each other since landfall in the north. Cithrin had a sense that she didn’t want to examine why the pair got on so poorly.
“And,” Charlit Soon said, lifting her chin, “he’s due to visit a particular set of farms tomorrow. I even have directions to the road he goes down to reach them.”
“Well done,” Cary said, then turned to Cithrin. “You know what you want to do, then?”
In the stall behind them, a thin, shaggy horse sighed and shifted, scratching himself against the wooden posts. The straw around her feet skittered in the little breeze. The others were looking at her, waiting.
“I know what I want to try,” she said.
The next day, they went out. Horses were too expensive to take without drawing attention, but the march wasn’t long, and the landscape welcomed them. The trees outside Rivenhalm were still bare from the winter, but warm winds had almost finished melting the snow. Only the deep shadows still held pale and dirty lumps, half snow and half ice, and all surrendering to the coming springtime. Pale-green sprouts were pushing their way up from the dark earth. Gravel and mud made a raised roadway, and a slope to the north came to a ditch already running with brown, murky water. Everything smelled of rich soil and the coming spring. Rivenhalm’s farmland to the west of the holding lay on a plain, but Cithrin and the others didn’t go so far as to see them. They made their little camp in among the trees on a long straight stretch, waiting. The low, white sky softened the sunlight, leaving everything cool and nearly shadowless. Everything else she’d done, now she was trying her hand at banditry.