The Widow's House Page 7

  How could he? Geder thought, but didn’t say. It would have been too hard to keep the venom out of the words. Instead, he patted Aster’s knee and nodded. The empty chair stood behind them.

  The music changed, and the ballroom floor cleared. Geder shifted in his seat, looking behind him. His personal guard stood at attention against the wall, ready for violence should violence come as it had before. He might have welcomed it over dancing.

  The first girl who approached the dais was Paesha Annerin, cousin of Lord Annerin and so related by marriage to Jorey Kalliam’s sister. She was a tall girl with dark hair and golden skin. She wore a gown of yellow silk that clung to her thighs. She bowed before them in a pose that let Geder see down the top of her dress to the sheer undergarments and the curve of her breasts. The tightness in his throat might have been embarrassment or desire or rage. When she spoke, it was to Aster.

  “My prince,” she said. “If you would honor me?”

  “Of course,” Aster said. She smiled, bowed again. Geder had to look away. As the girl made her way back to the floor, Aster motioned for a servant to take his cloak. The prelude to the dance floated up through the floor and would until all the dancers had taken their positions. There was no hurry.

  “I hate it the way they all dress,” Geder said.

  Aster, handing away his cloak, made his expression a query. Geder waved a hand at the ballroom.

  “Look at them,” he said. “They’re all showing their bodies like they were fruit on a streetcart. I’m not closed-minded about these things, but there are limits, Aster. There ought to be limits.”

  “It looks the same as always to me,” the prince said, rising. “It’s just fashion.” And with that, he moved out toward the floor. Geder watched him with a mixture of alarm and admiration. Aster was a boy. He’d been part of the court since he’d been born, and he knew the steps of the dances much as anyone would, but he strode out with a confidence and calm that no age or experience could guarantee. He would walk the dance with the Annerin girl, talk with her, be charming, and come back to his chair unflustered, unchanged, and without the slightest fear of being humiliated by her or by himself. Jorey was the same. Jorey had even asked Sabiha to marry him, and she’d said yes, and the two of them had been sharing a bed ever since. The raw courage it would take to ask that of a woman boggled Geder’s mind, and yet to other men it was normal. Easy.

  In his imagination, he saw Cithrin as she could have been, pale and perfect among the women of the court. Her Cinnae blood would have made her stand out among the overwhelmingly Firstblood nobility, but as the consort of the regent, she’d have been undeniable. He would have dressed her in pale cream with emeralds in her hair, and the whole court would have spent the season starving themselves to look like her. The tightness in his throat made it hard to breathe.

  The prelude reached its crisis point and began again. Geder shuddered and forced his mind away from her. The dancers were still strolling to their places. The floor wasn’t particularly crowded, and half the men on it were Geder’s father’s age or older. All the people who were forgoing the dance had crowded close to the wall, the concentration of them making for a hundred conversations and a mutter of shifting for position. He saw Canl Daskellin speaking with Jorey’s mother. Lady Broot was standing alone near one of the jugglers with a sour expression. Three male cousins of House Caot pushed and prodded each other like they were in private. It was hard to believe that Aster was only a little older than they were. A tight group of young women stood not far from the dais. Geder only noticed them because one girl—the one standing in the center—was looking at him. He thought she was Curtin Issandrian’s niece, and her name was something like Cheyla or Shaema. He couldn’t quite recall. Her jaw was fixed, and bright red marks showed in her cheeks. Her mouth was thin and hard, her chin lifted a degree. She looked like a warrior steeled for battle, and for a heartbeat, Geder was afraid she would draw a weapon. Then a worse idea occurred to him. She was going to ask him to dance.

  He rose, turning his back on the floor, and walked briskly to the captain of his private guard.

  “I have to go. Now,” he said, trying to keep the agitation out of his voice. “I have something I need to attend to. In the library. Alone.”

  The captain gave salute, and Geder walked out through the entrance that only he and Aster and the guards were permitted. As soon as the door was closed, Geder felt a rush of relief like pouring cool water on a burn. He took in a deep breath and let it out through his teeth. The first chords of the dance proper came through the wall, and he turned his steps back toward the Kingspire and home.

  The sunsets were coming later every day, the twilight lasting longer. He wore a jacket against the chill, but he needed it less often. The seasons he remembered from his youth had been longer. As a boy in Rivenhalm, he would spend what seemed like lifetimes in among his father’s books or watching the summer sun shimmer through the leaves of the trees near the river. The world had seemed dull then. It didn’t anymore, and he missed that.

  The white crushed gravel of the path ground beneath his feet. His guard followed at a discreet enough distance he could almost pretend he was alone. The stars glimmered in the blue-grey sky as it fell toward black. The crescent moon hung over the rooftops of Camnipol, looking so heavy and close, it seemed like a long enough ladder would reach it. High on the Kingspire, the banner of the spider goddess shifted in the breeze, the red dimmed and the pale field with its eightfold sigil almost seeming to glow with the moonlight. All this was his to keep and care for until it was Aster’s. That was years away yet. For now, and for years to come, Geder was the Severed Throne. The power should have been freeing. Instead, it weighed him down.

  In theory, he could do anything. He had command of life and death over all the subjects of the empire. If he wanted to, he could order any woman in the court to his bed. He’d read a book once about King Saavin of Berenholt, Berenholt being the third-age name for western Northcoast. Legend had it that Saavin had enjoyed intercourse with every woman in the kingdom before he died. The book had had woodcuts. Geder’s fantasies about sex had been fueled by the stories of the long-dead king’s lusty exploits. Now that he was in something like a similar position, he had to think the whole thing was a pornographic fantasy and nothing more. He couldn’t imagine ordering a woman to his bed. Ordering her to hide her disgust with him and his body. Or worse than disgust. Amusement.

  Nothing about the regency was what he’d expected. If a cunning man had come to him in those days so long ago in Vanai when he’d had the worst accommodations Sir Klin could find for him, when his days had been filled with duties and errands designed to make the citizens of the once-free city view him specifically as the worst face of Antea, and told him that these were the good times, he would have laughed. What he remembered best now was finding the scholars who would hunt down old books of speculative essay. He remembered the joy and excitement he’d felt, curled up against the cold with his little lantern sputtering from the cheap oil, and translating words from a dozen different languages. Uncovering ideas that would never have occurred to him otherwise. Reading anecdotes that history had almost forgotten. He hadn’t known he was happy then.

  For a moment, he heard the voice of the fire again, saw a woman silhouetted on the walls of the burning city. He shied away from the memory. He didn’t think about it often anymore, but when he did, that nightmare was still fresh. Even years later. Would Cithrin’s empty compound in Suddapal be the same? A bit of the past that returned to hit him in the face like a scourge for years to come? For the rest of his life?

  Probably.

  The climb to the temple was a long one, past the royal apartments that he shared with Aster, past the great halls and meeting rooms. When he’d given the space at the Kingspire’s height to Basrahip for his priests and mysteries, it had been with safety against riots in mind, and to celebrate the goddess who’d brought victory to Antea in the large and Geder in particular. The decision had
implications he’d never imagined, though. Including Basrahip’s increasing absence from court. The great bull-shouldered priest would still attend Geder whenever asked, but the sheer burden of climbing down the stairs and then up them again gave Basrahip reason enough to stay in his cell.

  It was a humble room with a mattress laid out on the stone floor, an old iron brazier, and a low table so that Basrahip, sitting on the floor, could read and write the letters that he held in such contempt. Geder, in the doorway, cleared his throat. Basrahip looked up from the page in his hand and smiled.

  “Prince Geder. It pleases me to have your company. Sit with me.”

  Geder lowered himself to the floor with a soft grunt, his back pressed against the wall. The pile of papers on the little desk was thick as Geder’s palm and scattered enough that he could see letters written by half a dozen different hands. Basrahip followed his gaze and sighed.

  “I had not thought when the goddess came again to the world it would require this of me,” the priest said. “I spend my days with dead words, empty of voices.”

  “Being Lord Regent isn’t what I’d expected either,” Geder said. “And there’s hardly anyone I can talk with about it, too. I mean, Aster, I suppose, but he has enough to carry already. I don’t want to burden him with my problems. I suppose he knows, though.”

  “He is a man who listens well,” Basrahip said.

  “I’ve had reports from Jorey. The army’s moving west already. He sent ahead to Newport and Maccia, and the cities were entirely willing to give permission to move freely through their lands, so it looks as though he won’t have to fight his way across the Free Cities.”

  “I am glad you are pleased with this.”

  “What about you? Is this all messages from the temples?”

  Basrahip nodded. “Much of it. They seek my guidance on many things, but they cannot hear my voice nor I theirs. And so we let our words die and send their corpses across the world.”

  “It would be easier if you could really be there.”

  “It would, but then I could not attend you as I promised. You are the chosen of the goddess, and so long as you have need of me, my place is here. But where there is confusion within your realm, more of my brethren are called for. Once all humanity has heard the truth of her voice, then her purity and her peace will follow.”

  “Oh. Are things not peaceful, then? I thought everything was going well.”

  Basrahip gestured at the letters, as if by their mere existence they showed the answer. “Her enemies are many, but none will withstand her. It was known that the children of lies would resist us. We spread as the light of dawn, and their resistance is powerless.”

  “Still. It sounds annoying at least, eh?”

  “Indeed,” Basrahip said with a rueful chuckle. “Also from our friend in the east. Dar Cinlama. He makes great claims, but his pages have no voice. They are shadows. Emptinesses. I long to hear his words and know.”

  A Jasuru in the brown robes of the priests entered the room carrying a tray with a bowl of stewed grain and goat cheese and a cup of tea. Geder scowled, trying to place the man’s face, and felt a thrill of fear when he did. The assassin who’d tried to kill him on the road in Elassae and been taken by the goddess. He knelt before Basrahip now, his black eyes empty of all malice.

  “My thanks,” Basrahip said, and the Jasuru priest bowed and left. Geder watched in silence until the sound of footsteps had faded.

  “Is it safe? Having him here? I mean, he was planning to kill me. He did kill one of your priests, didn’t he?”

  “That was before the goddess’s hand was upon him,” Basrahip said. “He will no more act against us than your cities will rebel. The truth of the goddess cannot be denied.”

  “Well, that’s… that’s good.”

  Basrahip took a spoonful of the stewed grain and slurped it. For a moment, Geder could imagine him as he might have been if it had not been for the goddess. A villager and goatherd in the Sinir mountains who might live a full life and die without seeing anything like a city. And here he was instead, in the center of Firstblood power in the world, sleeping on the floor and eating the same food he would have on the far side of the Keshet. Even if the goddess had given no other powers, that the man was here at all seemed miracle enough.

  “And you, Prince Geder? Are you well?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” he said, knowing that Basrahip would shake his head slowly at the words even as the event occurred. “I’m not fine.”

  “You will be,” Basrahip said. “Your wounds will heal.”

  Geder felt a tug of hope, of something like relief. It wasn’t enough, but it was enough to make him want if more. “Are you sure of that? Because right now, it seems like they’ll all go on forever.”

  Basrahip took another bite of his food and smiled around it. “Prince Geder, I am certain.”

  Cithrin

  Spring came slowly to Porte Oliva. For weeks, the winter chill hung on, breaking for a day or two or three, and then descending again upon the city. The rains that washed the streets and pulled the grey from the clouds into the gutters had a meanness to them Cithrin didn’t remember. Stray cats huddled under the eaves, glaring out at the people passing by with the hungry resentment of beggars. She went through the motions of being the woman she pretended to be. Dinners and meetings, contracts and letters of transfer. It was a sham in more ways than one. She pretended to have power when she had none, and she pretended to care, though she didn’t.

  Cithrin’s thoughts were always and only upon the war, and so when the conversations in the taprooms and alehouses changed to some other subject—when the trade ships from Narinisle would come, whether the queen in Sara-sur-Mar was going to make her Herez-born consort official, how the governor of the city had changed the tariffs in response to pressure from the free city of Maccia—it took her by surprise and left her annoyed. A year ago, Sarakal and Elassae had been nations. Today, they were subjects of the Severed Throne. For most of the merchants and tradesmen of Porte Oliva, it was only a curiosity. Or at most one factor among many in the private calculations of their work.

  The ivy that grew up the side of the bank’s guard quarters was brown and dead-looking, except for pale, green-fuzzed dots that would turn to leaves and flowers in the coming weeks. The stalls of the Grand Market sold winter wheat and woolen cloaks, but also seeds and bulbs and the lighter jackets and leggings that would soon come into use. By summer, the men and women of the city would be nearly nude from the heat and the dampness of the sea and the bulbs would be tulip blossoms. Everything would change, as it always did. The thought comforted Cithrin less than it would have, once.

  She had returned to her old apartment over the counting house with its thin floors and the stairway that went down the side of the building. She visited the taphouse that had been her regular haunt before Suddapal, before Camnipol, before Carse. She’d been welcomed by the same serving girl, served the same beer. It felt wrong that so little had changed in the city when so very much had been transformed for her. Yes, Magistra Isadau was in the city. No, Marcus Wester was not. Despite the changes, the city was so much itself, so confident in its permanence that she could almost believe that her travels and adventures had been only a long, complicated dream. That was how little the war had touched Porte Oliva up to now, and some days she could almost pretend it would last.

  “The trade ships from Narinisle?” she said, leaning her elbows on the table. “A month, I’d guess. It depends on the blue-water trade, and that varies.”

  “Will it affect the branch?” Isadau said, as she accepted the plate of sausage and onion that Yardem was offering her. The three of them were at the booth at the rear of the taphouse, half hidden from the common room by a sheer curtain of blue cloth with silver bells sewn to its edges.

  “Not directly,” Cithrin said. “The money will come in like a tide, and that will lift us as much as anyone. But Pyk’s too frightened of risk to sponsor a ship. We might hold some
insurance on cargo, but even that I imagine she’d keep to a minimum.”

  “You sound as though you disapprove,” Isadau said.

  “I do. But then she’d say I’m too reckless, so I suppose we’re even. At least we annoy each other.”

  “Likely she was wise this year,” Yardem said. “The trade ships may not come at all.”

  “That would be a pity,” Cithrin said. “Why not?”

  “Pirates,” Yardem said. “Rumor at the gymnasium is they’ve elected some sort of king.”

  “I thought that would be the king of Cabral,” Cithrin said bitterly. “God knows enough of the pirates have got noble blood.”

  Yardem shook his head. “This is someone new. Came in and began organizing. Word is the pirates are halfway to being their own fleet.”

  “Well-disciplined pirates?” Isadau said. “What’s the world coming to? Next we’ll have stones heading up in the sky like birds.”

  The Timzinae woman was thinner than when Cithrin had first met her. The blackness of her scales was duller than it had been, and the inner eyelid stayed closed longer and more often than it had. She smiled and she laughed, but Cithrin could see the weariness pressing her like an illness. If there had been a way to lighten her burden, Cithrin would have done it, whatever it was, however much it cost her. Of all the refugees of Suddapal, Magistra Isadau was surely among the luckiest. The Medean bank was in cities across the world, and so Isadau had a place here, and in Northcoast and Narinisle and Herez. It wasn’t her own situation that dulled her eyes and sharpened her laughter. It was the war and what it had done to her race, her city, her home. It was the siege in Kiaria, still dragging on. It was Geder Palliako and the spider priests who drove him.

  Cithrin felt the same.

  “How did the governor’s dinner go?” Isadau asked.

  “I pled a sick headache,” Cithrin said, then took a drink of her beer. It was stronger than the brews of Suddapal or Camnipol, and that was what she liked about it. It warmed her belly a little and loosened the knot there that kept her from sleep. In truth, she’d drunk herself to bed half the nights since she’d returned to Birancour, but it didn’t matter. She was always awake just after dawn, and if it had blunted her mind a little, it wasn’t as though Pyk’s covert and vicious control left much demand for her wits. She wiped her mouth with her cuff. “If I’d gone, it would have been true. The governor’s a terrible little man.”