The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (6 page)

“And if you find how they got here? Who’s writing them? I’ll get you your own weight in gold.”

The Jasuru’s eyes went wide. Geder regretted the words as soon as he’d said them. It was too extravagant a promise, but taking it back now would be embarrassing. He was stuck with it. He had to be more careful about that.

“I will turn the city out like a pocket, Lord Palliako,” Morn said. “I will pull every man, woman, and child in the salt quarter into the sea if I have to. No one will escape.”

“Good,” Geder said. “Do that.”

After the man had left, Geder turned back to the fire. The last remnants of the page floated over the coals, grey and fragile. He felt his scowl as an ache at the corners of his mouth.

“I thought after we stopped the apostate, everything would get better. That it would be over.”

“Everything is getting better, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said. “The world of lies is failing before us. All this that you see is only the curling back of the corrupt world. There is no cause for mourning.”

The darkness of Geder’s mood didn’t ease, but a layer of shame overlaid it. Basrahip was right, of course. Things were going well. They’d beaten the apostate. There was no reason that he should feel so dispirited. That he did left him with the creeping suspicion that he was the problem.

“Doesn’t matter,” Geder said, forcing a grim smile. “We’ll march ahead all the same. Back to Camnipol and Prince Aster and all the rest of it.”

“We shall,” Basrahip said. “Bring yourself, Prince Geder. The feast in your honor is to begin.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“Your work has been long and noble and hard,” Basrahip said. “Your sacrifices are deeper than those around you know. All this that troubles you? It is only the passing of a cloud across the face of the sun. Come eat and drink. Let those who love you surround you. All will be well.”

Put that way, the feast actually sounded worth sitting through. Geder hauled himself up and bowed to the priest. “I’m sorry. You’re right. A little food will certainly do me some good. Let’s go to it.”

The great hall was filled with the members of the court and their families. The heat of their bodies filled the room. The scent of pork and mint, stewed plums and cinnamon,
fresh bread and sweet butter caught Geder’s attention at least. Lanterns of worked crystal glowed along the walls. Men and women both wore the overlarge black leather cloaks that he himself had made popular what seemed like a lifetime before. A group of Dartinae acrobats amused the crowd; lithe thin bodies capering impossibly in the air, eyes aglow. A Southling cunning man conjured fire out of the air for a time, his massive black eyes seeming to recoil from the light. A Cinnae girl with a silver slave chain around her neck sang second-empire love songs in a voice as rich and warm as a viol, and bright and clear as a flute. Geder waited for it all to salve him, but the most it managed was to distract.

It wasn’t until Basrahip stood before them all on a raised dais, his palms out to the crowd commanding silence, and gave a speech honoring Geder as Lord Regent and chosen of the goddess that he started to feel a little better.

Geder Palliako had been drawn across the Keshet, called for the righteousness of his soul. He had brought the Righteous Servant out of the desert and into the noble houses for her glory. No man in all of history had done as he had done. It was like being reminded of something he’d almost forgotten. Yes, that was right. He had led the empire to glory. That was true. He had been entrusted by the dying King Simeon to care for and raise Aster. That was true too.

By the end of the speech, Geder actually felt a little better about himself and all he’d done. Even the slaughter in the swamp seemed to have taken on a patina of grand adventure. If he went to bed afterward more nearly at peace, the rest, he told himself, would pass with the morning. It was only that he needed to recover from his struggles.

It wasn’t—couldn’t be—that he was oppressed because the morning would begin a long, cold journey along the jade road. Or that he already dreaded the work that would be
waiting in Camnipol for him. Or that he still loved Cithrin, and hated her. Missed her, and who she could have been to him. That he was disappointed by how the death of the apostate and the moment of greatest victory had seemed to change so little.

Applause and cheering rose up at the end of Basrahip’s speech, and Geder stood to acknowledge it as his due. Once, long before, he’d told Basrahip that he wanted his enemies to suffer. It had been true at the time. The adulation of the court washed over him, warming him, cleaning him, forgiving him his failures or else denying they existed.

If that wasn’t enough, it was close. It would have to suffice. He drank in not love but renown like a man dying of thirst and pretended to be slaked.

B
uildings, she thought, echoed each other. Though they might have been in different cities, every palace she’d been in had had the feel of a palace. The rooms, the decors, even the scents of the places might be as different as apples and walnuts, but they served the same functions, and so perhaps it was natural that they took on an ineffable sense of being the same. Marketplaces all seemed to have the same resemblance among themselves as siblings of a large family. Even the cunning man tents in the field had some resemblance to the sickrooms of great manor houses.

And the same was true, it now appeared, of gaols. The one she’d seen most recently had been a prison of the innocent: Timzinae children parted from their parents and brought to Camnipol as assurance of the good behavior of the newly enslaved race. The one she sat in now held the guests of King Tracian of Northcoast. And still they were meant to divide space, to confine, to represent the power that one person held and another did not. They were even meant, as unalike as they were, to represent justice, though if justice had so many different faces, she wasn’t at all certain she knew what the word meant any longer, and good God, but her mind was running away with itself.

Clara adjusted her sleeve for what must have been the fiftieth time. Cold radiated from the stone of the wall, and
the weak winter light that came from the high, thin window did little to push back the shadows. Her throat felt tight, as though she might be coming down with something, and wouldn’t
that
be unpleasant. She’d heard cunning men say that unchecked emotion could bring on illness, but she couldn’t help thinking of all the times she’d felt swept away by strong feeling and hadn’t gotten so much as a sniffle, so perhaps that was only a story they told to explain away what they had no better answer for.

But why, after all she’d been through, all she’d
done
, should she feel so unmoored now? She had faced down soldiers drunk with bloodlust with no more than her voice and a raised eyebrow. She’d sentenced men to death and stood to watch her sentence carried out. What was this meeting—with an unarmed man who hadn’t enough power now to walk outside when he wished—that it should make her blood cold? The complications of her allegiance to her nation were well enough known by now. Jorey knew. Barriath. Vincen Coe had known almost before she had. Hers was a secret well-practiced in the telling, only…

Only never before to someone who would feel it as a betrayal. The thought settled on her heart, calming it, though not in a comforting way. At least she knew now what fear was driving her. Knowing made it easier to bear.

“Lady?” the gaoler said. He was a thick man. Firstblood, but as wide across the shoulder and belly as a Yemmu. She wondered—a passing fancy—if the races echoed one another the same way buildings did. If a gaoler in Borja might seem the fellow of this man, though he was Tralgu or Jasuru or Dartinae. Clara took a deep breath, rose, and banished all other concerns.

“Yes, I’m ready,” she said, and the gaoler turned. She followed.

The walls were too cold to be damp. Frost rimed them, and the gaoler’s torch smoked. He looked back at her when she coughed, his expression an apology. She lifted her chin and moved on. Their footsteps sounded lonely on the bare stone, as if they were looking for some companionship besides the walls. It was a silly thought, but that she’d had it meant something. The door, when they reached it, was black oak bound in iron. There was no rust, and she found herself perversely grateful for that. It would have been worse, somehow, if the cell had been poorly kept.

“I can come in with you if you like,” the gaoler said. “Keep him in line.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“You sure about that, lady?”

Was she? It didn’t matter. The answer had to be the same. “I’ll call if there’s need.”

The gaoler shrugged, undid the lock, and slid back the bar. Even with her assurances, he pulled the door open carefully, his torch at the ready like a cudgel. Within, the cell was small and close, with a window no more than a finger’s width just by the ceiling. But a crystal lantern hung from a hook, and there was room enough for a tiny desk beside the cot. If there was a lingering scent of the chamber pot, it was no worse than she’d suffered in far nicer rooms, and a small brazier left the air warmer than the hall. Lord Skestinin himself rose when she entered, his snowy eyebrows beetled, but his eyes bright and alert. He wore a prison gown rather than the uniform of a lord of the Antean court, but he wore it well.

“Lady Kalliam?” he breathed, as if uncertain of his senses.

“Clara,” she said. “If you’ll permit my calling you Anton. We are family by blood now, after all.”

“Sabiha?”

“I understand the birth was touch-and-go, but from all I’ve heard she and the baby are quite well now. They’ve named her Annalise, after me. I hope that’s all right.”

Lord Skestinin grinned. His teeth were yellow as ivory, and crooked. She wondered now whether she’d ever seen him grin before. “Whyever would it not be?”

“That’s a longer conversation,” she said, and turned back to the still-open door. “I’ll call.”

The door closed, though the bar did not scrape back into its place. Poised for a swift return, she supposed. Well, it would be embarrassing to have a visitor assaulted on one’s watch. She couldn’t blame the man for being anxious on her behalf. She arranged herself at the foot of the cot. Lord Skestinin lowered himself to the thin desk, seeming almost to deflate. Clara cast a weary eye on the walls, the cot.

“It’s not so bad,” Skestinin said. “I’ve shipped in smaller cabins than this. Miss having a deck to walk at will, though. And the sea. I seem to have fashioned myself into the sort of man who needs the sea about him. What news of the war?”

Clara shook her head. It wasn’t a question she knew how to answer. The war was going well, or poorly, or dancing on chaos’s edge. How was she to tell the difference? Or report it? Facts, she supposed. Simplicities. “Jorey took Porte Oliva. I suppose you know that, seeing as you aren’t there any longer.”

“May he burn the place flat,” Skestinin said with a rueful laugh. “It was not the site of my greatest triumph. And my men? The navy?”

“The ones who were still imprisoned in the south are freed. I don’t know how the ships stand. Winter, you know.”

“Winter business,” Skestinin said with a bitterness she recognized.

“Winter business,” she said, letting the words roll in her mouth.

“If it isn’t too indelicate to ask,” Lord Skestinin said, “how were you captured?”

“Oh,” Clara said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t.”

For a moment, he was confused. She watched him understand. He lifted his eyebrows and looked at the ground. “Ah,” he said.

“You’ve seen what’s gone on in Antea. Palliako is the worst thing that’s happened to the empire in my lifetime or yours. We’d have been better giving the throne to Aster straightaway. A kindhearted child would be better than the Lord Regent we have now. And, Anton, these
priests
…”

“Yes, my lady,” Lord Skestinin said. “The foreign priests your late husband led his rebellion against. I… understand and respect your loyalty to his cause.”

She felt for a moment as if he’d spoken in some unfamiliar language. Her laughter was sharp and sudden and only partly related to mirth. There was also disbelief in it. And something sharper for which she had no name. “I can accuse myself of many things these last years, but slavish devotion to Dawson has not numbered among them.”

“We disagree on the point. No, hear me out. I am loyal to the crown. Did I agree with every choice King Simeon made? No, but that doesn’t matter. You can’t pick and choose when to be loyal. That isn’t loyalty. There is a right system to the world, my lady. God, then the king, then the lords of the court. The father rules over the mother rules over the children. The husband rules over the wife. That is the right order of the world from the stars to the lowest nomads in the Keshet.”

His voice had grown louder and rougher. Spots of red appeared on his cheeks. She considered him closely, as she might a particularly colorful insect that had landed on her arm. The brightness of his eyes. The folds of his
sea-leathered skin. The jut of his jaw. He had been her son’s commander for years. He was her own family, first by marriage, and now both of their blood flowed in a little girl in Camnipol. How strange, then, that she felt she had never seen him before as he was.

“You’re quite right,” she said. “We do disagree on the point.” He clenched his jaw, his white beard jutting out like a goat’s. A sorrow she had not expected shook her. And then a guilt, and a resentment at being made to feel guilty. She laughed again, but more gently and more to herself. “Still, we needn’t be rude to each other. God help us both, we are family. Is there anything I can do to make your confinement less odious?”

“I wouldn’t ask favors,” Lord Skestinin said. “Gives the wrong impression.”

“Of course. But all this unpleasantness aside, might we not come to a private understanding?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

A gust of wind spat a snowflake in through the window. It spiraled close to the lantern, shining for a moment, then winking out as it melted. “The world is a cruel place, and the next few years are going to be difficult,” Clara said. “I don’t know how this all comes out. And… and they did name her after me.”

Lord Skestinin’s smile was flinty. “The king protects his land. The father protects his child. And his grandchild, however unfortunately conceived. There is no need for agreement between us, Lady Kalliam. Not for that.”

“Should history favor my views over your own, my lord, I will bend stone and bleed fire to see Sabiha kept safe. And not as a favor to you.”

“I am pleased that you still have some honor. Perhaps we may yet be reconciled.”

“It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened since we left Camnipol. If I see your wife and daughter, is there a message you’d like me to give them?”

“Other than that Lady Kalliam and her exiled son have betrayed the kingdom?”

“Yes, other than that.”

“No,” he said. “It won’t be called for.”

Clara put a hand on his knee. The fur was cold to the touch. “It was good to see you.”

“And you, my lady,” Lord Skestinin said. Etiquette was such a beautiful system of lies. It allowed everyone to pretend when the truth was too ugly to bear. That they all shared in the lie made it at least something that they shared. She rose and called for the guard. The door opened at once, and then closed behind her once she’d reached the hall. The bar ground back into place with a sense of finality. She wondered whether she had just seen her granddaughter’s grandfather for the last time.

“Ma’am?” the gaoler said, bringing her back to herself.

“Yes, of course. They must be waiting,” she said. “Lead on.”

N
o chance then of Skestinin taking our side?” King Tracian said. He was a young man, and she had a sense that it was more than just his age. He was older than Simeon had been when he took the throne, after all. There was a nervousness about him. An anxiety that seemed to infuse his words and movements. Perhaps it was natural in the son of a usurper. Or it might only be that he was harboring the sworn and public enemy of a kingdom that had recently conquered all its immediate neighbors and had an army camped at his southern border. Or that the last dragon roamed his street. Come to think of it, he had more than enough reason to be uncertain of himself.

“I think he will not,” Clara said, accepting a cup of mulled wine from Komme Medean’s thin hand. There were no servants in the withdrawing room, and none in the hall without. It was not a conversation to be overheard. “It would have been too pretty, I suppose, to have the Lord Marshal and the master of the fleet both in our confidence.”

“Shouldn’t get greedy,” the old banker said. If it was meant to be ironic, he hid it well.

The room was colored with gold. It was in the tapestries on the walls, woven into the carpet beneath her feet. There were other colors—the shining green and indigo of the cushions, the scarlet of the wall hangings, the gentle yellow of the lanterns—but all of them seemed there to offer contrast to the gold. The air was mulled wine and incense, rich without being cloying, which was much rarer in a palace than Clara thought it should be. Incense was too easily overdone. It spoke well of Tracian that he knew to restrain it. There was a plate of raisins and cheese to go with her wine, though she couldn’t bring herself to taste them. Not yet.

The king of Northcoast paced, four steps along the wall, then back the other way, hands clasped behind him. Komme Medean sat beside the wine with his fingers woven together and a calm expression in his eyes. She had the sense that the world might turn to fire and ash, and the banker would have the same calm about him. The king turned again. For a moment, she wasn’t certain what he reminded her of. Ah, yes. A captain pacing his deck.

“It would be a kindness to put him in a larger cell,” she said. “One, perhaps, where he could walk a bit.”

“Did he ask for that?” Tracian said.

“No,” Clara said. “He was quite careful to ask for nothing.”

“We have Barriath’s pirates,” Komme said. “And the ships
of Northcoast, of course. I’d be surprised if we couldn’t convince Narinisle and Herez to step in as support at the least. Though they may balk at open battle.”

“Is open battle our plan?” Tracian said. “Because last I checked, we still had an army to the south with orders to bring Cithrin bel Sarcour to Camnipol in chains.”

“Jorey won’t come north,” Clara said. “We’re safe here. For now.”

“With respect, Lady Kalliam,” Komme said as he poured himself more wine, “are we sure of that? Have we had word from the army since you came?”

“I haven’t, but neither was I expecting any. Jorey has no intention of marching on Northcoast. He knows I’ve come, and he will wait until I return.”

“You’re making some assumptions,” the old banker said. “By your own report, the soldiers are overtaxed. There are two of the priests there at least.”