The Dragon’s Path (36 page)

“She knows the risks, but she doesn’t understand them,” Marcus said. “I can say everything to her I just said to you, and she’ll answer me back. Argument for argument. She’ll say the regained capital justifies the decision. That the holding company isn’t liable for her, nor are the other branches, so anything they make back is a step above where they were when the money was simply lost.”

“And yet,” Master Kit said.

“I know how to protect her from thugs and raiders. I know how to fight pirates. I don’t know how to protect her from herself, and hand to God, that girl is the worst danger she’ll ever face.”

“It can be hard, can’t it? Losing control,” Master Kit said.

“I don’t control her,” Marcus said.

“I think you do, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
What are three decisions she’s made before this? In the time you’ve known her, I mean.”

Yardem Hane loomed up behind the actor, wiping oil from his fingers onto a bit of grey cloth. For a moment, Marcus thought it might offer distraction, but the Tralgu’s passive expression told him that he’d come to listen to the conversation, not to end it.

“She got that dress of hers,” Marcus said. “And she chose to go to your performances.”

“Two, then?” Master Kit said.

“She picked the fish for dinner,” Marcus said.

“And how would you compare that with other contracts you’ve had?” Master Kit asked. “I don’t believe you have thought of Cithrin as your employer so much as the little girl who’d swum out near the riptide. Has she paid you?”

“She hasn’t,” the Tralgu rumbled.

“You can stay out of this,” Marcus said. “She couldn’t. She didn’t have any money of her own. All of this belongs to someone.”

“And now,” Master Kit said, “it seems she might be able to offer gold. And make decisions of greater weight than whether to have fish or poultry. Or what dress to buy. If this scheme of hers works, she’ll be choosing where to live, how and whether to protect herself, and all the other thousand things that come with her trade. And I suspect you’ll be here as well, at her side and protecting her. But only as her hired captain.”

“Which isn’t what I’ve been doing all along?” Marcus said.

“Which isn’t what you’ve been doing,” Master Kit said. “If you had been, you’d have asked Cithrin before you killed Opal.”

“She’d have told me not to.”

“And I think that’s why you didn’t ask. And why you dread the time when you have to ask, and you have to defer to her judgment even if you think she’s wrong.”

“She’s a little girl,” Marcus said.

“All women were little girls once,” Master Kit said. “Cithrin. Cary. The queen of Birancour. Even Opal.”

Marcus said something obscene under his breath. Outside in the street, the gambler’s man called out. Great fortune could be theirs. Odds offered on any fair wager.

“I am sorry about Opal,” Marcus said.

“I know you are,” Master Kit said. “I am too. I knew her for a very long time, and I enjoyed her company for more than half of that. But she was who she was, and she made her choices.”

“You were her lover, weren’t you?” Marcus said.

“Not recently.”

“And she was a part of your company. She traveled with you. She was one of your people.”

“She was.”

“And you let me kill her,” Marcus said.

“I did,” Master Kit said. “I believe there is a dignity in consequences, Captain. I think there’s a kind of truth in them, and I try to cultivate a profound respect for truth.”

“Meaning this is Cithrin’s mistake to make.”

“If that’s what you heard me say.”

Yardem flicked an ear, his earrings jingling against each other. Marcus knew what the Tralgu was thinking.
She’s not your daughter.
Marcus set his foot against the wall of boxes. The wealth of a city that didn’t exist anymore. The gems and trinkets, silk and spices traded to let the lucky escape the flames. All of it together wouldn’t buy back one of the dead. Not even for a day.

So what was the point of it?

“Her plan isn’t bad,” Marcus said. “But I have the right to hate it.”

“I can respect that position,” Master Kit said with a grin. “Shall we prepare the oil bath for the future foundational documents of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva before the women come back?”

Marcus sighed and rose.

W
hen the morning came, Marcus walked beside her. The mornings were still cold, but not so much that he could see his breath. Men and women of the three predominant races of the city passed one another as if the differences in their eyes and builds and pelts were of no particular concern. The morning mist drifted through the great square, greying the dragon’s jade pavement. The condemned of the city shivered in the cold where all could see. Two Firstblood men hung as murderers. A Cinnae woman sat in the stocks with chains around her ankles as a recalcitrant debtor. A Kurtadam man hung by his knees and barely able to draw breath. Smuggling. Marcus could feel Cithrin pause. He wondered what the penalty would be for what they were about to do. It seemed unlikely to have precedent in the judges’ tables.

The wide copper-and-oak doors of the governor’s palace were already open, a stream of humanity pouring in and out from the center of authority. Cithrin lifted her chin. Smit had painted her face before they left. Faint, greyish lines around her eyes. Rose-grey blush coloring her cheeks. She wore a black dress that flattered her hips, but the way a matron might be flattered. Not a girl fresh from her father’s home. She could have been thirty. She could have been fifteen. She could have been anything.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Don’t walk from your ankles,” he said, and she slowed, taking the brickwork steps one at a time.

Within the palaces, the sunlight filtered through great walls of colored glass. Red and green and gold spilled across the floors, the twinned stairways. It mottled the skins of the people walking through, leaving Marcus with the sense of being in some enchanted grotto from a children’s song, where all the fish had been changed to minor political officials. Cithrin took a long, shuddering breath. For a moment, he thought she would leave. Turn on her heel, flee, and leave the whole mad folly behind. Instead, she stepped forward and put a hand on the arm of a passing Kurtadam woman.

“Forgive me,” Cithrin said. “Where would I find the Prefect of Trades?”

“Up the stairs, ma’am,” the Kurtadam said with a soft southland lisp. “He’ll be a Cinnae like yourself. Green felt table, ma’am.”

“My thanks,” Cithrin said, and turned toward the stairs. The Kurtadam woman’s gaze stayed on Marcus, and he nodded as they passed. As a bodyguard, he felt out of place. There were a few queensmen here, scattered among the crowd, but no other private guards that he could see. He wondered if the real Medean bank would have brought him along or left him outside.

At the top of the stair, Cithrin paused, and he did as well. The prefectures were set haphazardly about the room like a huge child had taken up the tables and scattered them. There were no aisles, no rows. Each table stood at an angle to the ones around it, and if there was a system to the chaos, Marcus couldn’t see it. Cithrin nodded to herself, gestured that he should stay close, and waded into the mess. A third of the way across, she came to a table covered with green felt where
a Cinnae man in a brown tunic sat paging through stacks of parchment. A small weighing scale perched beside him, a row of weights behind it like soldiers at attention.

“Help you?” he said.

“I’ve come to submit letters of foundation,” Cithrin said. Marcus felt his heart speeding up, like the moments before a battle. He crossed his arms and scowled.

“What class of trade, ma’am?”

“Banking,” Cithrin said, as if she were doing something perfectly normal. The Prefect of Trades looked up as if seeing her for the first time.

“If you mean a gambling house—”

“No,” Cithrin said. “A branch house. The holding company is in Carse. I have the papers, if you’d like.”

She held them out. Marcus was certain he caught a whiff of old urine, that the section of the page that the wax had protected showed three shades darker than the rest. The prefect would laugh, call the queensmen, end the game here before it began.

The Cinnae man took the parchment as if it were spun glass. He frowned, his gaze skipping over the words. He stopped and looked up at Cithrin. His pale face flushed.

“The… the
Medean
bank?” he said. Marcus saw the conversations around them shudder and stop. More eyes were turning their way. The prefect swallowed. “Will this be a restricted license or free?”

“I believe the letter calls for free,” Cithrin said.

“So it does. So it does. A full and unencumbered branch of the Medean bank.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” the man said, and fumbled, reading for her name on the papers. “No, Mistress bel Sarcour, only I hadn’t been told to expect it. If the governor knew, he’d have been here.”

“Not called for,” Cithrin said. “Would I pay the fees to you?”

“Yes,” the prefect said. “Yes, that would be fine. Let me just…”

For what felt like a day and likely took less than half an hour, Cithrin fenced with the bureaucrat. Payment was delivered from the bank, assayed, accepted, and receipts issued. The man scribbled a note on a sheet of pink onionskin, pressed an inked signet on the page, signed, and had Cithrin put her name over his signature. Then he offered her a small silver blade. As if she had done it a thousand times before Cithrin cut her thumb and pressed her print onto the page. The prefect did likewise.

And it was done. Cithrin took the onionskin, folded it, and slipped it in the purse that hung from her belt. Marcus followed her back down the stairs and out to the square. The sun had burned off the mist now, and the sounds of human traffic were the same low roar he’d become accustomed to.

“We’re a bank,” Cithrin said.

Marcus nodded. He would have felt better if there had been someone to fight. Or at least threaten. The anxiety of what they’d just done wanted some release. Cithrin took a handful of coins from her purse and held them out to him.

“Here,” she said. “That’s to hire on more guards. Now that it’s my money, we might as well spend it. I’m thinking a dozen men, but use your best judgment. We’ll want day and night guards, and then a few to accompany goods when we transfer them. I didn’t haul these silks all the way from the Free Cities to have some back-alley thief take them now. I’ve got my eye on a couple of places the bank might operate from that give a better impression than squatting over a gambling shop.”

Marcus looked at the coins. They were the first she’d ever paid him, and so what she’d just said was her first true order. The warmth in his chest was as surprising as it was powerful.

However it unfurled from this, whatever the consequences, the girl had done what damn few would have had the nerve for. This from the half-idiot carter boy he’d met in Vanai last autumn.

He was proud of her.

“Is there a problem?” Cithrin asked, real concern in her voice.

“No, ma’am,” Marcus said.

I
ssandrian’s parade began at the edge of the city, snaked through the low market, then north along the broad king’s road, past the gates of the Kingspire, and then east to the stadium. The broad streets teemed with the subjects of King Simeon, sworn loyalists of the Severed Throne, all standing on their toes to catch a glimpse of the slave races arrived to turn Antea into the puppet of Asterilhold. The roar of the assembled voices was like the surf, and the smell of their bodies threatened to overwhelm the gentle scents of springtime. Some follower of Issandrian’s cabal had paid the rabble to carry banners and signs celebrating the games and Prince Aster. From where Dawson sat, he saw one—beautiful blue-dyed cloth with the prince’s name in letters of silver—held aloft on poles, but with the wrong side up. It was Issandrian’s revolt in a nutshell: the words of nobility hefted by men who couldn’t read them.

The noble houses had their viewing platforms set in order and position according to the status of each family’s blood. The place each man stood told where he put his allegiance. The state of the court as a whole could be read in a glance, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. Banner colors from a dozen houses fluttered about king and prince, and more of them belonged to Issandrian’s cabal than not. Even Feldin Maas’s grey and green. King Simeon sat high above it all,
dressed in velvet and black mink, and managed to smile despite what was before him.

A column of Jasuru archers marched through the streets, the bronze scales of their skins oiled and glittering like metal in the sun. They carried the stripped-hide banners of Borja. Dawson made a rough count. Two dozen, say. He noted it down as the archers paused before the royal stand and saluted King Simeon and his son. Prince Aster returned the gesture with the same wide grin that he had each company before and would each one still to come.

“Issandrian’s a cruel bastard,” Dawson said. “If you’ve come to steal the boy’s place, you should have the dignity not to put ribbons on it.”

“For God’s sake, Kalliam, don’t say that sort of thing where people might hear you,” Odderd Faskellan said. Behind them, Canl Daskellin chuckled.