“I see,” Kit said, but Geder couldn’t stop now. The words had begun and they wouldn’t stop until he’d finished.
“And there are buildings in Hallskar with wooden perches. Either the perches would have to be a wood that doesn’t burn or someone would have had to make them after there weren’t any dragons left to use them. And there’s not a layer of ashes under any of the ruins in the Division, and it just doesn’t make sense!”
“Then perhaps there were no fire years,” Kit said.
Geder’s blood felt bright in his veins. Somewhere in his gesturing, he’d spilled a bit of the water from his cup. It dripped down his knuckles. Clara Kalliam put a hand on his shoulder and smiled down at him. His father nodded. His breath felt clean and clear for the first time he could remember. Across the room, Cithrin stood like a statue of some ancient hero, her chin high but her eyes kind.
What if it wasn’t the death throes of the enemy, but just losing a war? What if killing the apostate in Asterilhold wasn’t the final victory of the goddess? What if having a temple in a city didn’t mean it would never fall?
Wouldn’t it all make more sense?
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you know. And I’ll say what I think of it.”
“Yes,” Cithrin said, as Kit cleared his throat.
“I think I might not be best suited to that,” he said. “Do you think we should invite in Captain Wester?”
It took hours. The story of Master Kit’s apostasy, the power he’d found in the word probably, and the price he’d paid for it was all told by Marcus Wester and a Tralgu called Yardem, presumably so that Geder wouldn’t feel he was being influenced by the spiders in the apostate’s blood. The trek through the wilds of Lyoneia and the ancient ruins guarded by the Southling tribes there. The sword and the temple, the attempt on the life of the goddess, and the discovery that she was no more than a statue and a story. And then the search that Geder himself had begun with Dar Cinlama, and the discovery of the last dragon.
Then Cithrin came and sat by him, her voice low and serious, her pale eyes on his in a way he’d thought would never happen again. She didn’t take his hand, and he didn’t reach for hers. She told what she’d learned from Inys. The prank against Morade that had begun the last war between the dragons, the invention of the tool that would strip the dragons of their slaves, the release of the spiders, and the fall of the ancient world. Geder listened, enraptured. It was like all the best histories and poems and speculative essays he’d ever read, wrapped together with confirmation by sources who’d been there.
All my time in power, he thought, I could have been doing this. I could have been having conversations like this one and hearing stories and putting them together. It made something familiar and terrible shift in his gut that he didn’t think about. Not yet.
They came to the creation of the Timzinae—a race made for fighting the dragon Morade—and he stopped them.
“But why did the Timzinae want to kill Aster?” Geder said. “Why did they suborn Lord Kalliam?”
“They didn’t,” Clara Kalliam said. “Dawson would never have taken direction from a foreign power or another race. My husband did what he did because he felt the throne had been usurped by a cult of foreign priests who were using you and Prince Aster as puppets.”
And, she didn’t need to say, he was right.
For the first time, the implications of it all struck him and left a vast and oceanic hollowness behind his breastbone. If this was all true, if Basrahip’s goddess was an artifact of the dragons, if the Timzinae were only another race of humans fashioned from the Firstbood as they’d all been, if the war was not about bringing the light of truth to the world, then Jorey’s father had been right.
The cities they’d taken in the war were no more or less likely to fall than any other captured land in any other of a thousand wars. Geder had been tricked into throwing those children into the Division. Like a hand puppet stuck on the big priest’s fist, he’d been telling Aster all the things Basrahip had poured into his own ear and none of it true.
He’d been played for the greatest idiot in history, and he’d brought Antea to the edge of collapse by it. The thing that had been moving in his belly came to life, lifting up into his heart, his throat, his brain.
It was relief.
Cithrin
It was working. The change showed in the way he held himself and the timbre of his voice. Geder Palliako sat on his divan like it was made from nails and he was determined to endure it. All around, the others sat and stood, spoke and were silent. Played their parts. Cithrin cared about Geder.
He looked… bad. His skin had taken on a strange sheen, like dust and oil. His eyes seemed smaller than she remembered them, and darker. When he first came in, his father had led him to Clara to create a setting of the familiar. The known. Geder’s voice then had been tight and tense, his body braced as if against a coming blow. She’d feared what would happen when she spoke, and it made her speak sooner than she’d intended.
His dark eyes had widened when he saw her, but he hadn’t called for his guards. When Cary embraced him, and then the other actors, each greeting him as an old friend, as if none of the atrocities that had come between the day he’d come out of hiding and now had ever been, he’d seemed dazed. The deeper change came with Kit, sitting at his side, opening the doors of Geder’s mind the way she’d hoped he would. When the history of the spiders came clear to him, it was like watching a child see his first rainbow. The joy and wonder in it would have been beautiful if they’d been in some other setting. As it was, they were more unsettling. What she had hoped for, what she’d come here to achieve—but unsettling.
Marcus spoke to him in professional tones, like a soldier giving a report of a battle, as he explained all that had come before. Disapproval showed in the corner of his mouth, but Geder didn’t see it. He only listened. As Marcus tore away every story that Geder had lived by, every poisoned dream, Geder’s breath deepened. The tightness in his voice smoothed gently away. As he grew calmer, she did as well. When her turn came, and she sat beside him, he seemed almost the man she’d known in the darkness, and she could at least remember the girl she had been.
They brought tea and coffee which Geder drank without seeming to notice he was doing so. She unfolded the story of Inys and Morade with all the skill and grace Cary and the players had been able to teach her, and Geder listened to it all. His eyes were on her, but seeing the deep past and the grand sweep of history. He could kill me, she thought, but he isn’t going to.
The idea felt like victory.
“But why did the Timzinae want to kill Aster?” Geder said. “Why did they suborn Lord Kalliam?”
Cithrin looked for the words, for the gentle way to say it. Clara Kalliam answered before she could, and her voice was hard as stone.
“They didn’t. Dawson would never have taken direction from a foreign power or another race. My husband did what he did because he felt the throne had been usurped by a cult of foreign priests who were using you and Prince Aster as puppets.”
Geder’s eyes went flat, his expression terribly still. His eyes flickered from side to side as though he were reading some invisible text written on the air. Cithrin felt her belly tighten with excitement and fear. It had all gone so well, and now they were at the crisis point. Everything depended on the next few seconds. If he heard the woman’s words as an insult, they would all be dead by morning. Cithrin felt a deep calm come over her. She didn’t think he would.