The Dragon’s Path (45 page)

“Is there really such a thing as purely northern interests?” she asked. “Narinisle is in the north, and it seems to concern all of us.”

The air in the courtyard seemed to still. She’d pulled the hidden meaning of all their banter and laid it on the table. She wondered whether she’d just been rude, so she smiled and sipped her wine, acting as if it had been intentional. Qahuar the half-Jasuru smiled at her, nodding as if she’d won a point in a game.

“Narinisle may be in the north,” the graying Kurtadam said, “but the problems are all in the south, aren’t they? King Sephan and his unofficial pirate fleet.”

“I agree,” the Cinnae mercenary captain said. “The only way that trade can be made safe is if Cabral agrees that it is. And that can’t be done on the water alone.”

The Tralgu woman grunted and put down the shrimp that she’d been eating.

“You aren’t going to go on about putting a land force together to protect ships again, are you?” she said. “Porte Oliva starts a land war with Cabral, and the queen’ll burn us down as an apology to King Sephan faster than the Anteans lit Vanai. We’re a city, not a kingdom.”

“Done right, you don’t have to use it,” the Cinnae said, bristling. “And it isn’t an invasion force. But the escort that protects trade ships needs to be able to put swords onto land. The pirate problem can’t be solved if they can run into a cove someplace and declare themselves safe.”

Cithrin sat on a high stool, cocked her head, and listened as the façade of politeness began to crack. Like an artist
putting a mosaic together one chip at time, she began to make out the shape of divisions and arguments in the group around her.

The chartered collaboration between the shipwrights and the merchant houses was pressing for a limited escort restricted in its range to within a few days’ sail from Porte Oliva. Protect the neighborhood, their argument went, and the trade ships will come of their own accord. It would cost less, and so the offsetting tariffs could be small. Listening to the Cinnae man and Tralgu woman press, Cithrin was fairly certain the merchant houses in question traded in insurance. The limited escort still left a great territory of water unsafe, the chance of piracy and loss high, and so the return on insurance wouldn’t go down.

The Cinnae man, on the other hand, was a militarist, because what he brought to the table was a military force. If the others could be made to agree that only a massive force of arms—and especially the sword-and-bows of a mercenary company—would ensure that piracy end, he would be in the best position to provide it. Naturally, none of the others agreed.

The Tralgu woman’s argument centered on a treaty between Birancour and Herez that Cithrin didn’t recognize. She would need to find a copy to understand how it applied, but simply knowing what she didn’t know felt like a little victory.

As the wrangle went on, her smiles felt less and less forced. Her mind danced through each phrase her enemies used, drew connections, set up speculations that she would research once the evening was done. The governor kindly, gently kept the tone from escalating to blows, but stopped short of making peace. This was what he’d brought them
here for. This was how he worked. Cithrin held that information as well.

After her third glass of wine, she felt certain enough to put her own argument out.

“Forgive me,” she said, “but it seems that we’ve all become somewhat fixed on piracy as the only problem. But there are other things that can happen to a trade ship. If I understand correctly, three ships were lost in a storm five years ago.”

“No,” the Tralgu woman snapped.

“Those sank off Northcoast,” the Kurtadam said. “They never got as far as Narinisle.”

“And yet the investment in them was just as lost,” Cithrin said. “Is the question we’re considering how to protect trade? Or is it only how to make pirates a lesser risk than storms? It seems to me that an escort ship should be able to answer any number of crises.”

“You can’t have an escort that follows the ships everywhere and answers every problem,” the Cinnae man said.

“The initial cost would be high,” Cithrin said, as if that were the objection he’d raised. “It would require a commitment from Porte Oliva long enough to ensure a reasonable expectation of return. And likely some understanding with ports in the north.”

She said it all as if it were idle speculation; a chat among friends. They all knew what she’d just said.

The Medean bank would protect trade ships from Porte Oliva as far as they wished to go and all the way home again. She had enough money that she could pour gold into the project and not see a return for years. And the bank, with its holding company in Carse, had connections throughout the northern countries. If it was a grander vision than she’d meant to bring to the table, that was fine. The others could
compare how many soldiers they had, how cheaply they could do something small, how treaties and trade agreements could be brought to bear. Cithrin could say,
I am the biggest dog in this pit. I can do what you cannot.

She liked the feel of it.

The courtyard was silent for a moment, then as the Kurtadam drew in an angry breath, the half-Jasuru with the green eyes spoke.

“She’s right,” he said.

Qahuar Em was sitting at the governor’s side. In the light that spilled down from the saturated blue sky, his skin had taken an almost bronze tone, like a statue brought to life. When he smiled, she saw that his teeth, white as a Firstblood’s, had the hint of Jasuru points to them.

“You’re joking,” the Kurtadam said, sounding deflated.

“You could do it by halves,” he said, his gaze shifting to the Kurtadam for a moment before shifting back to Cithrin. “But what would stop Daun from doing the same? Or Upurt Marion? Newport or Maccia? You could make Porte Oliva a little bit safer, and be more popular as a place to trade for a few years while other cities followed your example. Or you could move decisively, dominate trade in the region, and capture the trade route for a generation. It just depends what your goals are, I suppose.”

Cithrin found herself smiling at him even as it occurred to her that he’d spoken even less than she had. She’d need to watch him, she thought. And as if he’d read her mind, he grinned.

The conversation went on for another hour, but the wind had shifted. The Kurtadam restricted himself to petulant asides, the mercenary reframed the military aspect as part of a wider strategy, and the Tralgu lapsed back into silence. The undercurrent of anger and suspicion was palpable, and
the governor seemed quite pleased with the entire proceeding. When Cithrin left, her beaded shawl wrapped around her shoulders, it was hard to remember to step like a woman twice her age. She wanted to walk from the ankle.

She waited on the steps looking out across the square toward the great marble temple, pretending a piety she didn’t feel. The sun sank lower in the west, shining into the temple’s face and making the stone glow. The moon, already risen, hung in the cloudless indigo of the sky, a half circle of white and a half of darkness. Between the beauty of city and heaven and the perhaps slightly too much wine she’d drunk, she nearly missed her quarry when he walked by.

“Excuse me,” she said.

The half-Jasuru turned, looking back over his shoulder as if he didn’t know her.

“You’re called Qahuar?” she said.

He corrected her pronunciation gently. Standing on the step below hers, their heads were even.

“I wanted to thank you for supporting me in there,” she said.

He grinned. His face was broader than it had seemed in the courtyard. His skin less rough, his eyes softer. It struck her that he was roughly the age she pretended to be.

“I was going to say the same of you,” he said. “Between us, I think we’ll shake loose the smaller players. I admit, I hadn’t been expecting to compete against the Medean bank.”

“I hadn’t expected to be competing at all,” she said. “Still, it’s flattering of the governor to think of me.”

“He’s using you to get better terms from me,” Qahuar said. And then, seeing her reaction, “I don’t mind. If it goes poorly, he’ll be using me to get better terms from you. One doesn’t reach his position by being sentimental.”

“Still,” Cithrin said.

“Still,” Qahuar said, as if agreeing.

They stood silently for a moment. His expression shifted, as if seeing her for the first time. As if she confused him. No. Not confused. Intrigued. The angle of his smile changed, and Cithrin felt a warmth in her own expression. She found herself particularly pleased that the man was her rival.

“You’ve made the game more interesting, Magistra. I hope to see you again soon.”

“I think you should,” Cithrin said.

I
n the rolling flint hills where Sarakal gave way in no clearly marked fashion to the Keshet, the term
prince
had a different meaning than Geder was accustomed to. A man might call himself a prince if he controlled a certain amount of land, or commanded a force of soldiers, or had been son or nephew to a prince. Even race had little impact. The princes of the Keshet might be Yemmu or Tralgu or Jasuru, and there was apparently no formal barrier to other races, though in practice no others were.

Firstblood were especially absent from the wide, arid plains, and Geder found that his small group—himself, his squire, and four men of his father’s service—quickly became an object of curiosity in the towns and villages east of Sarakal. The Firstblood prince, they called him, and when Geder tried to correct them, confusion followed. Translating his rank into the terms of the Keshet was a pointless and probably impossible task, and so when the traveling court of Prince Kupe rol Behur extended Geder its hospitality, he found it easiest to pretend he was more or less an equal to the gold-scaled Jasuru lord.

“I don’t understand, Prince Geder. You’ve left your land and your people searching for something, but you don’t know what or where it is. You have no claim to it, nor any
idea whether claim could be made. What profit do you hope to make?”

“Well, it isn’t that kind of project,” Geder said, reaching for another of the small, dark sausages from their communal plate.

When Geder had seen the dust plume from the traveling court rising above the horizon like smoke from a great fire, he’d expected it to be like being on campaign. He’d imagined the tents to be something like the kind he’d slept in to and from Vanai, that he slept in now in his quiet exile. He had misunderstood. He hadn’t ridden into a camp—not even a grand and luxurious one. It was a township of wood-framed buildings with a temple dedicated to a twinned god Geder hadn’t heard of and a square for the prince’s feast. Weeds and scrub in the streets showed that it had not been there the day before. Geder assumed it wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Like something from a legend, it was a city that existed for a single night, and then vanished with the dew. Torches smoked and fluttered in the breeze. The stars glowed down. The summer heat rose from the ground, radiating up into the sky.

Geder popped the sausage into his mouth. It tasted salty and rich, with an almost occult aftertaste of sugar and smoke. He’d never eaten anything like it before, and if it had been made of lizard eyes and bird feet, he’d have eaten them anyway. They tasted that good. Of the sixteen communal plates that the slaves carried around the table, this was his favorite. Although the green leaves with red spots and oil was a close second.

“I’m not looking,” he said through his full mouth, “for something that will get me gold.”

“Honor, then.”

Geder smiled ruefully.

“Speculative essay isn’t something that gives a man great honor. At least not among my people. No, I’m going because I’ve heard about a thing that existed a long time ago, and I wanted to see what I could find out about it. Write down what I’ve learned and what I suspect, so that someday someone can read it and add what they know.”

And,
he thought,
stay away from the turmoil in Camnipol and find a corner at the farthest edge of the world where the trouble’s least likely to reach me.

“And then?”

Geder shrugged.

“That’s all,” he said. “What more would there be?”

The Jasuru prince frowned, drank from a mug either cast in the shape of a massive skull or else made from one, and then grinned, pointing a long worked-silver talon at him.

“You’re a holy man,” the prince said.

“No. God no. Not me.”

“A cunning man, then. A philosopher.”

Geder was about to protest this too, but then caught himself.

“Maybe a philosopher,” he said.

“A man, his mount, and the horizon. I should have seen it. This project is a spiritual matter.”

The prince lifted his massive arm, barked something that sounded like an order. The hundred men and women at the long tables—knights or only sword-and-bows, Geder couldn’t be sure—raised a shout, laughing and sneering and pushing one another. A few long moments later, a pair of guards appeared at the edge of the square, each with an iron chain in his hand. The chains led back into the darkness, slack in a way that left Geder thinking they were mostly ceremonial.

The woman who came into the light at the end of the
chains looked ancient. The broadness of her forehead and the swirling black designs on her skin marked her as a Haavirkin even before she lifted her long, three-fingered hand in salute. Geder had met Haavirkin before when the elected king of Hallskar sent ambassadors to court, but he’d never seen one as old or with the same sense of utter dignity.