The Dragon's Path

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 artistputting 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 themhere 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