The Dragon’s Path (40 page)

“When we’re ready to go,” he said.

Once, the thick wooden door had opened onto a common area with a high counter on one end. The counter was gone now, and the chalk marks on the slate weren’t offered odds, but the names of Marcus’s new guards and their duty rotations. All four were waiting now where the gambler’s clients had been, looking out the narrow, barred windows and making crude jokes about the people passing by on the street. When Marcus entered, the laughter stopped, and the new guards—two Firstblood men, a Kurtadam woman, and a Timzinae boy Marcus had taken on a hunch—stood to attention. He’d need more. Overhead, the boards creaked where Cithrin was pacing.

“Bag ready?”

“Yes, Captain Wester, sir,” the Kurtadam woman said.

Marcus nodded at her, his mind suddenly an embarrassing blank. She had broad shoulders and hips, and arms as thick as her legs. Her pelt was a glossy black, darker even than the Timzinae boy’s scales. And her name was… Edir? Edem?

“Enen,” Yardem said. “You carry the coin. Barth and Corisen Mout take forward and back. Captain and I will take flanks.”

“And me?” the Timzinae boy asked. The nictatating membranes of his eyes opened and closed in a fast nervous tic. He was easy enough. Whatever his name was, everyone called him Roach.

“You’ll stay here and wake the others if anything interesting happens,” Marcus said. Roach deflated a bit, so Marcus went on. “If anyone’s going to make a play for the strongbox, they’ll do it when most of us are away. Keep the door barred, and your ears sharp. You’re going to be in more danger than we are.”

Roach saluted sharply. Enen stifled a smile. The two Firstblood men went to the weapons chest and started arraying the most vicious weapons that the queensmen would let them carry through the streets. Marcus turned and went back out toward the private stairway, Yardem at his side.

“I’m never going to remember all these names,” Marcus said.

“You always say that, sir.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. Good to know.”

The rooms that had seemed so small and cramped when it had been just him, Yardem, Cithrin, and the piled wealth of Vanai had become a respectable private residence for the new head of the Medean bank. It was little more than a room in the back with her bed and desk and a meeting room at the front with a small privacy closet to the side, but Cithrin had put together a hundred small touches that transformed it: fine strips of cloth that hung over the windows, a small religious icon nestled in a corner, the short lacquered table presently covered with old shipping records and copied bills of lading. Taken together, they gave the impression of the home of a woman twice her age. It was as much a costume as
anything Master Kit and his players sported, and one that Cithrin wore well.

“I need someone from the Port Registry who’ll talk to me,” Cithrin said instead of hello. “The trade ships from Narinisle should be coming, and I need to know better how that works. It looks like half the trade in the city happens when those ships come in.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Yardem said.

“Where to today?” Marcus asked.

“A brewer’s just outside the wall,” Cithrin said. “I met her at the taproom. Her guild’s letting her replace her vats, but she doesn’t have the coin to afford it.”

“So we’re loaning it to her.”

“Actually, she’s not permitted to accept loans at interest,” Cithrin said, pulling a light beaded shawl across her shoulders and arranging it the way Master Kit had taught her. “Guild rules. But she is permitted to take money from business partners. So we’re buying part of her business.”

“Ah,” Marcus said.

“If she comes short, we’re in a position to take her shop in hand. If I cultivate a relationship with a cooper and a few taphouses, I can arrange the kind of mutual support that makes everyone very happy for a very long time.”

“Long time,” Marcus said, tasting the words.

“And anyway, breweries are always good investments,” Cithrin said. “Magister Imaniel always said so. There’s never going to be an off market for ale.”

Cithrin looked around the room, pursed her lips, and nodded more to herself than to them. Together, they walked back down the stairway, Cithrin stopping to secure the door behind them. In the street, a half dozen children were playing a game that involved kicking an old wineskin and screaming. Cithrin turned toward the entrance, almost bumping
against a Kurtadam man. Marcus silently added the construction of an interior door to his list of things that ought to be done. Having to walk outside to go from one set of rooms to the other had been pleasant enough when they were hiding. Now it was just an unnecessary risk.

The Firstblood men, Corisen Mout and Barth, were laughing with each other but sobered as the three of them came in. Enen was ready, a small leather bag strapped across her shoulders, her hands free and ready. She wore a curved dagger and a weighted baton on her hips. When they walked out to the street, the six of them fell into an easy formation. Despite the close, crowded streets, their path was always clear, the citizens of Porte Oliva standing aside to let them pass. Curious gazes followed them, but only a few especially bold beggars attempted the approach, and they tried for Cithrin. No one came near Enen and her burden of coin. They moved north, through the great wall, and to the spillover buildings of the city beyond it. The press of bodies was more than Marcus liked. The smells of sewer and sweat were thicker here, the streets both more crowded and wider than behind the wall in Porte Oliva’s center.

The brewer’s, when they reached it, was a two-story shop built around a narrow courtyard with its own well. Wide doors stood open to the yard, the vats and barrels squatting in the yeast-stinking shadows. The brewer, a Cinnae woman so thick about the body and face she could almost have passed for Firstblood, came out to meet them, grinning like they were family.

“Magistra Cithrin! Come in, come in!”

Marcus watched as Cithrin and the brewer kissed one another’s cheeks. He nodded to Enen, and she shrugged off the bag of coins and presented it to the girl as if Cithrin were what she appeared to be. None of the new guards thought
the bank was anything different than it claimed. There was no reason that they should.

Cithrin took the bag and gestured to Marcus that he and the others should stay in the yard. He nodded once, and Cithrin and the brewer took one another by the hand and walked into the dim recesses of the brewery, talking like old friends. A Cinnae boy no older than Roach came out wearing a thin leather apron and bearing mugs of fresh ale. It was sweeter than Marcus liked, but with an almost bready aftertaste that he could learn to enjoy. Marcus let the three new guards settle themselves on the stone wall of the well before he met Yardem’s eyes and glanced across the yard. The Tralgu drank down his ale, belched, and ambled along at Marcus’s side.

“Decent ale,” Marcus said.

“Is.”

“What do you think of this scheme of hers?”

Yardem’s ears flicked back, then forward again, considering. Marcus knew that just by asking he’d changed the Tralgu’s answer. What Yardem thought about a scheme that Marcus hadn’t questioned was a different thing.

“Seems to be working,” Yardem said. “Still more jewelry than I’d like in the basement, but we’ve got enough swords to scare off stray knives. I don’t know much about it, but it seems she’s likely to earn back the money she’s spending or near to it.”

“So that when the big men from Carse swoop down here, they’ll find it all more or less intact,” Marcus said. “She can hand it over to them, wash her hands, and there’s no harm done.”

“That’s the plan,” Yardem said carefully.

“Do you see her handing it back to them?”

Yardem stretched his long, thick arms, turning to look at
the open brewery as if he were bored and it was in the way. Marcus waited in silence, hoping that the Tralgu would disagree and expecting that he wouldn’t.

“She’s going to try to keep it,” Yardem said.

“She doesn’t know she’s thinking about it, but yes,” Marcus said. “She’s good at this. Maybe very good. And she’s not the kind of girl who stops when she likes something too much.”

Yardem nodded slowly.

“How’s she going to do it?” he asked.

Marcus sipped his ale, washing his mouth with it, then spat it onto the courtyard stones. A dozen pigeons lifted off from the rooftop, spinning across the wide blue overhead.

“I don’t understand half of what she’s doing now,” he said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“I don’t know what she’ll try. Likely she doesn’t either. But when she sees it, she’s going to reach for it. Whether it’s a good idea or not.”

T
he days that followed Geder’s return to Camnipol flowed around him like river water around a stone. Gatherings at the houses of the highest families in Antea filled his days, celebrations for his own victory in Vanai and for the coming anniversary of Prince Aster’s naming took the nights. Almost the day after his unexpected revel, he began seeing black leather cloaks the image of his own appearing among the brightly dyed fashions of the court. Men who had never bothered to cultivate a connection to House Palliako had begun calling on him. If his father seemed put off by the attention, that was understandable. Changes that came suddenly could feel catastrophic even when they were changes for the better.

The only things that would have made the ripening spring better would have been rooms within the city itself instead of night after night of heading out before the city gates closed and sleeping in his campaign tent and for the nightmares to stop.

“I don’t understand why I shouldn’t order the disband,” Geder said, spreading a spoonful of apple butter over his morning bread. “If I don’t do it soon, Lord Ternigan’s sure to.”

“He doesn’t dare,” Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch,
said. “Not until all the foreign swords and bows are safely out of Camnipol.”

“It’s a disgrace,” Marrisin Oesteroth, Earl of Magrifell, said, nodding. “Armed rabble in the streets of Camnipol. And hardly even a Firstblood among them. I don’t know what Curtin Issandrian was thinking, bringing the slave races. Next he’ll be honoring Price Aster with pigs and monkeys.”

Around them, the lesser gardens of House Daskellin glowed in the late morning sun. The golden blossoms of daffodils nodded in the breeze. To the east, the reconstructed stadium loomed, stories tall and painted white and red. The games for the prince were to start the next day, but the preliminary spectacles had been running for days—bear baiting, show fights, archery competition. And with them, a growing tension that reminded Geder of the still, heavy heat of the clear summer day before a storm night.

“Did you smell those Yemmu cunning men?” Odderd Faskellan, Viscount of Escheric and Warden of the White Tower, asked with a snort. “The stink coming off them made my eyes water from the platform. And the Southlings.”

The plain-faced man at Geder’s side—Paerin Clark, he was called, and with no other title given—drank from his cup as if to hide his expression, but the others around them nodded and grunted their agreement and disapproval.

“They fuck their own sisters,” Marrisin Oesteroth said and took a drink of cider. “It’s not their fault that they do. Dragons made them that way. Keep their bloodlines true, just like hunting dogs.”

“Really?” Geder asked. “I read an essay that said that was a myth started by the Idikki Fellowship after the second expulsion. Like Tralgu eating babies, or Dartinae poisoning wells.”

“You’re assuming Tralgu don’t eat babies,” Marrisin Oesteroth said with a laugh, and the others joined in. Including Geder.

The conversation turned to other matters of court: the increasing unrest in Sarakal, the foundering movement to create a farmer’s council, rumors of a second war of succession in Northcoast. Geder listened more than he spoke, but when he did, the men seemed to listen to him. That alone was as intoxicating as the cider. When the last of the food was carried away by the servants, Geder took his leave. There would be another gathering like this tomorrow, and another the day after that. And an informal ball that night, scheduled opposite a feast for King Simeon hosted by Sir Feldin Maas. Geder knew because Alberith Maas had asked grudging permission to attend the feast. Geder had allowed it. The court might be divided, but he assumed it always was. Given the number and quality of people at the gatherings he’d attended, he felt fairly sure that the half that had lifted him up into their number was both larger and more powerful. He could afford to be magnanimous.

The sun shone in the late morning sky, the warmth soaking into Geder’s cloak and leaving his body feeling soft and comfortable. He strolled through the black-cobbled streets, feeling almost as sure of himself as he had during his first days in Vanai. The lowborn man with a long dirty beard saw him coming and scuttled out of his way. A young woman with a beautiful tea-and-milk complexion smiled at him from her slave-drawn carriage. Geder smiled back and watched her turn to watch him as she was borne away. His jaw ached pleasantly from grinning.

The eastern gate of the city was wider than the southern, built beneath a great archway of worked stone that reached almost as high as the Kingspire itself. Horses’ hooves and
carriage wheels clattered against the voices of small merchants. The air stank of manure, animals soiling the streets as quickly as prisoners of the petty court could scrape it up. Callers walked under rough wooden signs, announcing whatever news they were paid to repeat: a particular butcher had been soaking his meat in water and selling it by weight, an outbreak of the pox had been traced to a brothel in tanner’s row, a boy had been lost and a reward posted for his return. It was the gossip of any great city, and Geder enjoyed the sound of it without paying attention to the meaning of the words. Every syllable had been paid for, and it was safe to assume most were lies. Geder paused at a stand where a crag-faced Tralgu with a missing leg sold treats of candied lavender and honey stones. When Geder tossed him a coin, the scowling Tralgu caught it overhand, snatching it out of the air.