“If I helped the throne, I’m pleased,” Clara said.
When he looked up at her, his eyes were as bright as a fever. “I’m going to show her it wasn’t me. She’ll understand. Better than anyone. Don’t you think?”
“I think we’ll all need to be careful,” she said, not answering the question, though he acted as if she had.
When she returned to her tea, Geder made a show of shaking Lord Emming’s hand and escorting him back into the house as though it had been him the Lord Regent had come for and meeting Clara had been only a happy accident. It was overacting of such scale that it would, she expected, be inscrutable to the court. They would see the change, though. The Lord Regent had returned to public life. His energy and optimism of form would mean something to those seeing it. What exactly they would think, she couldn’t guess.
“Preparations for Jorey’s triumph?” Lady Skestinin asked. An undertone of jealousy sharpened the words.
“Something like that,” Clara said mildly.
Not all men of the court had left Camnipol, but those who remained fell into distinct categories: the old and infirm, like Jaram Terrinnian, Earl of Attenmarch, who had outlived three kings in his time and hardly ever left his gardens; the very young, like Daunan Broot, toddling now after his mother and unlikely to see his father in this world; the highest leaders of the empire, like Geder and Aster and the bull-huge Basrahip; and the disgraced. It was to this last category that Clara turned her attention.
Curtin Issandrian’s home shared the street with the one Geder had claimed from Feldin Maas. From its gate Clara could see the vast and unruly hedge where she’d hidden once from her cousin’s husband’s guards. Where a wounded huntsman had stolen a kiss, long before her own husband had died. She supposed that with so many lives packed so close together, all the city must be like this. The architecture and streets recurring in people’s lives, meaning something a bit new every time, but echoing all that had come before. Or perhaps that wasn’t the city. Perhaps that was the whole world.
The courtyard outside Curtin Issandrian’s house had fallen into disrepair. The cobbles themselves showed holes where the cold had shattered stones that had not been replaced. The hedges had the yellowed look of distressed plants, and the flowers within showed more stem than blossom. The door slave was a Kurtadam man with a greying pelt and a limp, who seemed astonished that anyone would come to the house. Company at Issandrian’s compound was clearly an exceptional thing.
The years had been kinder to the man himself than she would have expected. His once long hair remained short-cropped as she had seen it last, but he also sported a thick mustache and beard that suited him better than she would have guessed. His whiskers, like his gardens, were in need of some trimming, but the potential was there.
“Lady Kalliam,” he said, walking with her into his withdrawing room. “It’s been too long. I hadn’t expected to see you again.”
When she’d been there last, it had been to filch letters from his study. She recalled it now with a combination of shame that she’d taken advantage of the man’s good nature and pride that she’d gotten away with it. She sat on the divan now and he sat across from her, his legs crossed.
“I’m afraid events have conspired to keep me away from court more than I might have liked,” she said.
“I can’t say you’ve missed much of consequence,” Issandrian said. “Or at least, if you have, I’ve missed it as well. I made an unfortunate friend in Alan Klin once, and I’m paying for it still. The Lord Regent isn’t a man who easily forgets a grudge.”
The Lord Regent, she thought, is a man who will easily forget whatever it pleases him to forget and recall what he wishes to recall. It’s what makes him most like the rest of us.
“Well, the wheel of the world hasn’t stopped turning yet,” Clara said. “There may be changes of fortune ahead still.”
“I don’t see much hope of it,” Issandrian said.
“I do, but I stand upon a slightly different stair.”
A Cinnae man in a servant’s livery knocked at the door, bowed his way in with a carafe of steaming coffee, served it, and bowed his way out. Clara took her pipe from her sleeve and packed it with fresh leaf.
“I wondered,” she said, “whether you might still have friends among the farmers?”
“Some, yes,” Issandrian said, and sipped at his cup.
“Have you a sense of whether there is a common opinion on the Timzinae slaves?”
“They’re a godsend,” Issandrian said, without hesitating. “There’s not a farm in the southern empire that hasn’t lost at least one son to the army. Near Sevenpol there are farms running that have lost four or five to it. Without the slaves, we’d be eating clouds and drinking raindrops.”
“I see,” Clara said, drawing on her pipe. The smoke tasted rich, and the coffee better. Issandrian’s gaze was a question. She let the smoke seep out through her teeth while she considered what she wanted to ask, and how she wanted to ask it. “Between the two of us, and purely as speculation—yes?—purely as speculation, what do you imagine your friends among that stratum would think of setting the Timzinae free?”
Issandrian laughed, but it was from shock, not condescension. That was good. “I can’t think why they would.”
“Say as speculation it was required to make peace.”
“Peace? Peace with who?”
“Elassae. Sarakal. Everyone.”
Issandrian put down his cup. His skin, already pale, had gone a shade paler. She gave him the moment, drinking her own coffee. It wasn’t quite pure, she thought, but she couldn’t identify what the extender was that he’d used. Something about the kind of bitterness it carried made her suspect it was a root of some sort. Issandrian folded his hands on his knees.
“I thought we were winning,” Issandrian said. “Everyone says that we’re winning.”
“We’re not.”
Issandrian pressed a hand to his chin. His distress would have been comic if it hadn’t been so sincere. “I can talk with them about raising more troops. I don’t know that there’s many to be had, but if it’s that or lose the war—”
“The war cannot be won. Only prolonged,” Clara said. “It may come to a place where prolonging it is worth the effort and blood, but that isn’t what I need to know of you now. I believe there is a change coming upon us rather quickly. If I’m right, it may give us a chance to save something of the empire, but we would need to be ready to act.”
“Lady,” Issandrian said. The poor man. He’d started his day as an outcast, ill-dignified and shunned by polite company. Now here he was listening to half riddles from a woman with the most complex and uncertain status in the history of the court. In his position she wouldn’t have known if she was being asked to defend the throne or conspire against it. Which, in fairness, hadn’t been clear to her either, these last few years. It was a problem, she supposed, of trying to use the tools of another time as if nothing had changed. This war was not like the last one, this kingdom was not the kingdom it believed itself to be, she was not the woman she had once been, nor Issandrian any of the versions of himself that had come before. Hardly a surprise that he felt a bit dizzy with it all.
He gathered himself. “I will do what I can,” he said. “What are you asking of me now?”
“Should we require that the Timzinae be freed, it will need to happen quickly and uniformly and without any of the farms demanding that they be excepted.”
“That won’t be easy,” he said.
“Not if it’s demanded without any return,” Clara said, then laughed. “I sound like a banker, don’t I? Well, regardless, if you could use what contacts you have to sound them out, we might be able to recompense them for their loss.”