The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (4 page)

Isadau extended her hand, and Clara took it warmly.

“I also have a daughter,” Clara said, “but she often finds it more comfortable to distance herself from me, poor dear.”

“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Barriath said. His voice was oddly childlike, as though the thought of his mother and sister being at odds distressed him. It wasn’t at all the reaction Cithrin expected of the exile of empire and pirate commander. She found it oddly endearing.

“Forgive me, Lady Kalliam,” Cithrin said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but are you here as an ally or a prisoner?”

The older woman laughed and took her chair again. “That is a fine question, isn’t it? I am here as a messenger and a spy.”

“A messenger from the Lord Marshal,” Komme said. “And a spy, it turns out, for us.”

Marcus made a small grunting sound that was probably some version of a laugh. “You recall how Kit and the players and I all spent weeks in Camnipol looking for the mysterious man who’d been feeding Paerin information on the Palliako’s court? It’s her. The handwriting matches. She’s been behind the struggle against the spider priests almost before we were.”

A rush of joy filled Cithrin. New intelligence of the Antean army, and more than that. A channel to feed her own information to the heart of the enemy. With someone at the Lord Marshal’s side, they could draw Geder’s army to its destruction. Only… no. She was doing it again.

“Is something the matter?” Chana Medean asked, but Cithrin waved the question away.

Komme was the one to pick up the thread. “We were just talking about our rather peculiar situation. Fighting alongside one of her sons against the other two. It seems that it’s even more complex than we’d thought.”

“Jorey’s been protecting his family. Myself and his wife and now his daughter as well,” Clara said.

“That,” Barriath said, “would be Lord Skestinin’s daughter and granddaughter respectively.”

“The same Lord Skestinin that’s in our gaol?” Isadau asked.

“Mentioned it was complicated, didn’t he?” Marcus said dryly. Lady Kalliam continued as if she hadn’t been interrupted.

“Jorey may be the man in Camnipol closest to Geder’s trust—apart from Basrahip and the priests and possibly Prince Aster—but he is not blind,” Clara said. “He knows as
well as any of us the danger that Geder poses to the world. And to Antea. And to the soldiers under his care whom he has led against you. I am very sorry, by the way, about what happened in Porte Oliva. I was there during the battle and its aftermath. I grieve for your losses.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said, then nodded, paused, shook her head. She felt as if she’d drunk too much wine. “Forgive me again. Have you just said that the Lord Marshall of Antea is ready to turn against the throne?”

“No,” Clara said. “I am saying that we need your help to save it.”

I
t was a fact well understood that a person was never a perfect match for the tales told of them. It might be something as small as Lady Caot’s reputation as having an iron will, which was true so far as it went but neglected her weaknesses for her grandson and butter tarts. It might be as great as the person of Geder Palliako, hero of Antea and champion of the empire, who was instead… what he was.

The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them. Reputation, even when deserved, inevitably meant simplification, and every simplification deformed. Clara knew that. Since Dawson’s death, it was the space in which she lived.

And still: Cithrin bel Sarcour.

It was a name to conjure with. The woman who had broken Geder Palliako’s heart. Who had tricked him into letting God alone knew how many Timzinae escape his grasp in the fivefold city of Suddapal. A half-breed whose Cinnae blood thinned and paled her. Or whose Firstblood taint left her thick and dark, depending from which direction one came to the question. A merchant-class woman who had outwitted the Lord Regent of the greatest nation in the world. The most hated woman in Antea, and so also secretly beloved.

It was legend enough to carry a full lifetime, and she
looked hardly more than a girl. So terribly young to have so much on her shoulders. And yet the impression she gave, sitting there among professional killers and hard-headed men of business and power, was one of naïve brilliance. A monstrous talent that could do anything because no one had managed to convince it of what was impossible. Apart from Geder himself, Clara couldn’t think of anyone she had met who had impressed her so profoundly as being dangerous.

“It’s nearly too late,” the girl said to the room and to herself. “If what you say’s true, he’s run the armies to their breaking point. Past it. And the priests have already begun to schism.”

“Have they?” Clara asked.

“Seen one already,” the mercenary captain—Wester—said. “Came in ready to lead King Tracian in glorious war against your Basrahip and Antea. Light of the truth, voice of the goddess. All the same hairwash, but pointed the other way.”

“Is he still at issue?” Clara asked.

“He’s a char mark on the pavement,” the captain said. “But there’ll be more like him. And faster, once your son’s army falls.”

“Does the one lead to the other?” Clara asked.

It was the Tralgu that answered. Yardem Hane, he’d been introduced as. He had a low, rolling voice that was beautiful in its way. “Retreats always invite a certain amount of chaos, ma’am. Gives the impression that no one’s in control. Takes time for things to calm back down.”

“But,” Komme Medean said through a vicious scowl, “with these fucking priests spreading lies no one can see through—themselves included—every little whorl becomes a whirlpool.”

“Has that potential, sir,” Yardem said. “Yes.”

Barriath cleared his throat and leaned forward. “If we could maintain the army as a whole and draw them back to Camnipol before they broke? And especially if we could coordinate an occupation by Birancouri soldiers who knew to watch for the priests?”

The Timzinae woman—Isadau—had been silent. Now she lifted her chin. When she spoke, her voice was thin and resonant as a bowed string. “Have we decided this, then? Is there no conversation about the people who’ve been killed or the families shattered?”

Cithrin bel Sarcour nodded, not in agreement, but a kind of recognition, as if the phrase was part of some other conversation.

“Isadau,” Komme Medean began, but the woman went on, her voice more terrible for being as matter-of-fact.

“I don’t ask for myself… No, that isn’t true. I saw my city humiliated,” she said. “I saw Firstblood men whipping Timzinae women through the street for sport. Children stolen from their mothers and fathers. Sometimes the priests were there, and
sometimes they were not
. I respect that the Lord Marshal and his mother aren’t pleased with Geder Palliako, but how does that wash clean all that’s been done in Antea’s name? Do we believe we can end this without also demanding justice? Because I am not convinced.”

And in a breath, what had been a meeting of minds with a common purpose became split. The Timzinae woman stood in one world, and Clara—to her dismay—in another. Like flakes of iron pulled by a lodestone, the others would become allies of one or the other. Already she could see it. Barriath shifting in his seat, moving toward her as if to protect her from attack. Cithrin easing down her gaze, pricked by a moment of shame perhaps. Guilt at her disloyalty. Chana Medean and Paerin Clark glancing at the old man of
the banking house to see how Komme reacted to the question, but the old man’s face was blank as stone.

And it had all been going so well up to now.

Clara took a deep breath, searching for words that would bring them back together. She couldn’t imagine what they were. To her surprise it was Captain Wester who spoke.

“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog. If the question’s how much do we have to punish the other side before we can stomach peace, my experience is you can do the enemy a damned lot of hurt before it starts feeling like justice enough. Most times it comes down to how many of them you can kill before you get tired and bored. And whether you can break them so they don’t take their turn after. Looking for everyone to feel happy is waiting for yesterday.”

The Timzinae woman’s inner eyelids closed with a faint click and she rocked back an inch as if she’d been slapped. The Tralgu’s tall, mobile ears went flat against his head in what looked like chagrin. “He’ll be better in a few days, ma’am.”

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” Isadau said and walked stiffly from the room.

Wester sighed. “Am I going to have to apologize for that?”

“Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said.

“Put it on the board for tomorrow.”

“Was already planning to, sir.”

“Still, she brings up a fair point,” Komme said. “Even if you pull Antea back inside its borders, there are going to be a lot of people howling for blood. It might not be too early to start thinking about what reconciliation would look like.”

Barriath snorted, “The spiders have been in play since
before the dragons fell. Don’t you think we should find how to win against the priests first?”

“Or figure out who we’re talking about when we say
we
,” Wester said.

Cithrin bel Sarcour raised her thin, pale hand. Her gaze was fixed on nothing, as if she were reading a text invisible to everyone else. “It has to all happen at once. The spider priests, the war—all the wars. And building what comes after to keep it from all starting up again. It all has to happen at the same time.”

“That’s quite a bit to ask,” Komme said.

“Well,” Clara said, “
necessary
isn’t the same as
simple
, is it?”

Komme’s laughter was sharp and barking, but she saw how it eased the tension in all the others’ faces. Except Wester’s. “Fair point, Lady Kalliam. If we’d wanted easy, we should have stayed home. Or all of you should have, at any rate. It isn’t as though I’ve left my house. Why don’t we drink a little wine and talk through this like it was a question of business. What do we have to work with?”

“All the money in the world,” Cithrin said, the phrase coming with a depth of meaning that Clara couldn’t entirely parse. Then she smiled at Clara with a brightness and sharpness that might have been genuine or an actor’s artifice. “And the mother of the Lord Marshal as an ally.”

“Well, one of those is better tested than the other,” Komme said. “But I follow you on both points. What else have we got?”

For the better part of an hour, they spoke. Much of it Clara followed—the letters written against the powers of the priests, the knowledge that the dragon Inys could provide, the dispositions of the Antean army and the forces rising in Elassae. Other points, like the peculiar relationship
among Narinisle, Northcoast, and Herez mediated by the new “war gold” letters, she couldn’t quite parse, but she did her best to listen intelligently. A brown-pelted Kurtadam girl brought platters of glazed meat and soft cheese. A Firstblood boy with skin as dark as a Timzinae’s scales poured wine into thick crystal cups. The day flowed quickly into night until the fire couldn’t outpace the chill. When, at evening’s end, they parted, Barriath walked with her to the rooms the bank had set aside for her.

For a moment, she suffered a sense of displacement. Memories of winter nights in Osterling Fells while Dawson was off on the King’s Hunt mixed with something more recent—walking in unfamiliar halls with a young man. So much had changed in her life in so few years. And in herself.

“Well,” Barriath said as they came to her rooms, “and what did you make of your first council of war, Mother?”

“A very apt rehearsal for the real one,” she said, and Barriath chuckled. A Dartinae servant, his eyes glowing a gentle yellow, slid her door open with a bow.

“That
was
the real one,” Barriath said.

Clara paused in her doorway. He didn’t sound as though he were joking, and his face didn’t have the expression he employed when he was teasing. But she couldn’t take what he’d said seriously. When she spoke, she sounded scandalized, even to herself. “Without a representative of the crown?”

“Things are different since the bankers took over.”

T
he journey from Jorey’s camp to the great city of Carse had been unpleasant, but not overly long. Jorey had given them good horses and a sturdy cart. Nothing grand enough to attract the wrong kind of attention on the road. Coming
so far and through so much only to be killed by bandits would have been absurd, but the world didn’t seem to shy away from absurdity now. If it ever had. Barriath had traded his disguise as Callon Cane for a servant’s robes and a cheap hat that drooped down on the sides to obscure his jawline. The winter roads were thinly traveled, and while the forces of King Tracian kept a close eye on the southern border, an old woman and her son weren’t a threat they feared. They had slept in merchant inns and public houses, keeping to themselves as much as they could. Barriath could pass for a man of no country, but the accents of the Antean court were too much a habit for her. She could no more deny her origins than explain them.

The hardships of following the army had served her well. She rose before dawn, her eyes opening while the still-dark sky betrayed nothing of the coming day, and traveled until twilight faded to dusk. Between the falling winter and their northern route, the light came late and left early. But the fighting had not reached Northcoast, and a mild autumn had left the granaries full, the harvest just passed still rich in memory. Clara had been greeted with as much generosity as suspicion, seen as much courage as fear. In time of war, it was more than she had hoped.

Her rooms at the holding company, home and hearth for Paerin Clark and the Medean bank, were less than the room she would have offered guests of her own in Osterling Fells, greater than she’d had in Abitha Coe’s boardinghouse in the poorer quarters of Camnipol. The bed was large enough for two, with a thin down mattress and wool blankets that she could lose herself in. The fire grate held a small blaze and the bricks held the heat for hours after the flames went out. The inner walls of the little keep bent in there, giving
her something like a balcony that looked down on the inner courtyard, walled off by thick cedar shutters with oiled cloth in the joints to keep out the wind.

When she slept there, she dreamed of Dawson. Something about the cold or the voice of the wind, perhaps. In her dreams, he was neither alive nor dead, neither with her nor apart. Often she did not see his face or hear his voice. There was only a sense of his presence that faded when she woke. For the hour or so she sat alone with her tea and honeyed bread, wrapped in a robe as thick as tapestry, she would remember him. The names of his favorite dogs. His overwhelming contempt for Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. The way he’d taught Barriath and Vicarian and Jorey to fight and to hunt. The melancholy she felt then wasn’t for her own loss. She’d spilled her grief in strange places, and what remained was a complicated tissue of fondness and gratitude and guilty pleasure at who she had become.

Dawson had wagered his life that the world could be kept as it had been: static and unchanged. He had lost. These people of ledgers and sums would have been as vile to him as the foreign spider priests. For him, the world had had an order. To plan a war against a noble—and Geder wasn’t king, but he was certainly of noble blood—without its being between peers would have been unthinkable. He would never have done what she had chosen to do. She loved him for that. Worse, she was relieved that he hadn’t lived to see this.

And she missed Vincen Coe. Not simply as a man, not any man, but the one particular face and body and voice. The lover of her new life as Dawson had been the lover of her past one. Necessity had made leaving him behind with Jorey easy. Not pleasant, never that, but easy. Once one saw what had to be done, it simply had to be done. She’d needed
to find Cithrin bel Sarcour, the enemy of her enemy, and hope to turn the fall of Geder Palliako into something other than the devastation of her country.

Perhaps it was even working. But as the first scattering of fat grey snowflakes swirled down from the white morning sky, she found herself picturing Vincen huddled in a cunning man’s tent. Cold. Still recovering from the wounds he had suffered. She wished him here, in relative safety. In her bed, where she could warm him and be warmed by him. And more than that. He was her one critical vice.

She knew, or thought she knew, what Antea would be if they failed against the spiders. And if they won? Who would she be then? Would she stand in the court by her remaining sons and turn her scandalous lover aside? Would she vanish into the low world at Vincen’s side and leave behind her children? Her grandchildren? All that she had built and loved and made?