She wanted to yell at him, to tell him that he was trying to find ways that she’d failed. That he didn’t want anyone to win if it wasn’t through him. It was the voice of her fatigue. “Go on,” she said.
“We have to build the thing. There have to be people at the palace ready to throw boards over some banquet hall’s windows or rain burning oil through a false roof or… something. And this while as near as we can manage it all the lie-sniffing priests there are swarm around the court like flies on a shit heap. This conspiracy of yours is too big already. Throw in builders and servants? The people who supply the oil and the boards? Even if it were Geder’s own guard, it’s too many people to keep the secret.”
“So we find a better way to build the trap. Simpler.”
Marcus made a thin grunt and scratched his head. “All right.”
“You have an idea?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But if you need one, I’ll find one. Someplace. Yardem, maybe. He’s always impressed by his own wisdom and clarity. But we will have to be clever about it. And there’s the problem of getting all the priests here when we’ve got two armies making their way toward us. If we wait too long, Camnipol will have already fallen when the bastards get here.”
“Can it be saved?”
“The city? No. If Camnipol’s not a ruin by winter, it’ll be because Karol Dannien decided to let it live. We can postpone the thing, but we can’t stop it.” He coughed out something like a laugh, and looked out to the east. The tower of the Kingspire was barely visible above the courtyard wall. “That temple of theirs. That’s a long way up, isn’t it? Well… ha. All right, I may have a way.”
But Cithrin barely heard him. The exhaustion in her body, already crippling, doubled. The army of Elassae was coming, and she should have been delighted. Not so long ago, she would have been. They were the wronged, the people crying out for justice that they deserved. That she and Magistra Isadau and Marcus—and Clara Kalliam in her way—had all risked their lives to achieve. She had seen the body of the Timzinae priest hung from his own church. She had seen the children ripped from their families, their parents shipped away as slaves. Many of those children were dead now. How could she want those to go unavenged? And yet what would killing the bakers and groomsmen, street cleaners and taproom servers of Camnipol achieve? No depth of violence ever retrieved a single person from the death they’d already suffered. More dead were only more dead.
“I don’t know what justice is,” she said.
“That’s because it isn’t the sort of thing you discover. It’s a thing you make.” She looked at him, and he shrugged. “There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It’s not that houses and songs aren’t real, but you don’t just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”
“Like war gold,” she said.
“Wouldn’t have been my first example, but why not? That’s about as made up a thing as I can think of.”
“Antea’s crimes can’t be paid for,” she said, testing the thought for the first time even as she spoke it. “They could fill the Division with the dead twice over, and it wouldn’t rebuild Suddapal or bring their children back to life.”
“That’s true enough.”
“It’s another debt that can never be repaid. That’s…” Marcus’s head snapped up to look at her, but she only shook her head. It was there, at the edge of her understanding, but she was spread too thin to grasp it now. It would come if she gave it time. If she had enough time to give it.
She walked through the house only half seeing it. Tapestries hung along the walls, telling the tale of House Palliako or else merely showing the skill of the weavers. A few servants scuttled along before her, staying out of her way as they’d been told to do. War was a debt paid with a debt that left both sides poorer. It was always that, and never anything else no matter what the songs and stories claimed. That was what Morade had seen and embraced. The mad dragon emperor had tried to drown the world in an acid that would eat away everything. But he’d failed once.
The dining hall was smaller than Maestro Asanpur’s café had been. Two long wooden tables stood at an angle to each other, platters of eggs and beans, bread and jam standing ready to be eaten. At the smell, Cithrin’s stomach lurched awake, and a vast appetite filled her. At the end of one table, the farthest from her, Lehrer Palliako and Geder sat across from each other, talking and gesturing and laughing. A father and a son, taking pleasure in each other’s company. Seeing them was like looking down a cliff; it left her a little dizzy. Or maybe that was only hunger and lack of sleep.
“Magistra!” Lehrer said, rising to his feet. “Please, come sit with us. There’s enough room, God knows. Isn’t there enough room, my boy?”
Geder nodded, but his eyes were on his feet and a wild blush was pushing up his neck and out to his cheeks. When his gaze did flicker up to meet hers, he tried a smile. She returned it, and the artifice was easier than she’d expected. And then she remembered how many lives had been spent by his misplaced affection and she looked away. Marcus shifted behind her.
“Thank you, my lord,” Cithrin said, “but the captain and I have business we should see to. I’ve only come for a moment.”
“Well, eat. Eat before you go,” Lehrer said, gesturing toward the expanse of food. “This is all for you and your people, after all.”
Cithrin took a plate of sausages in her hand. The first one popped between her teeth, flooding her mouth with grease and salt and the sweetness of roasted garlic. “You’re too generous,” she said.
“Not generous enough,” Lehrer said.
Clara
I am reconciling myself to the idea that I will never see my husband again,” Lady Skestinin said.
“Oh you mustn’t say that,” Delliah Kemmin said around a mouthful of sweet bun.
The garden party was at Lord Emming’s estate. A pavilion of colored canvas decorated with banners of colored silk had been raised over a wide paved square at the garden’s center. A trio of Dartinae slaves wearing glittering robes that matched their glowing eyes stood on a dais not far away from Clara’s table, their voices mixed in a careful harmony. They kept the song quiet enough not to interfere with conversation. The air was thick with the scents of turned earth and flowers and freshly brewed tea. The overall effect was to leave Clara shifting with a barely contained impatience.
“It has been too long without word,” Lady Skestinin said. “He was lost in Porte Oliva before the city fell. And I’ve been seeing a cunning man on it.”
“No,” Rielle Castannan said. “Which one?”
“The Jasuru woman that Lady Caot recommended,” Lady Skestinin said. “She’s been lighting fires for me and reading the flames. She’s seen his body in them, she said. Killed and buried under the plains of Birancour.” Her voice broke at the last. Clara put down her teacup too abruptly. It rattled.
“Before you give up all hope,” she said, “I would recommend being sure your cunning man is what she claims to be.”
Lady Skestinin’s lips tightened and her shoulders slid back a degree. “I’m not certain what you mean, Lady Kalliam.”
“Ask her something you have the answer to,” Clara said. “See whether she can learn what you do know before you put too much trust in her ability to know what you don’t.”
Because, while the plains of Birancour was a pretty phrase and rich with connotations of lost love and exotic locations, she’d been there. There were any number of Antean dead in that ground, but Lord Skestinin was in a decent if uncomfortable cell in Carse. Not that she could say that. It was only that watching another woman’s grief be exploited upset her, even if it was Lady Skestinin’s.