The Dragon's Path

were political like the idiot King Ardelhumblemub with his oversized crown. Some, Stannin Aftellin the perpetually lustful Firstblood in his traditional love triangle with a phlegmatic Dartinae and a manipulative Cinnae, were bawdy and racial and political all together.
    Many more were more local. Marcus was pausing for a moment by a performance about a filthy butcher who smoked his meat with burning shit and ground maggots into his sausage when a Cinnae woman in the crowd started yelling at the puppeteer for taking gold from a rival butcher. At another, four queensmen with swords and copper torcs watched a story about plums and a fairy princess with scowls that suggested the allegory, whatever it was, might put the performer on the wrong side of the law.
    The public house they stopped at had a courtyard that overlooked the seawall. The sun was sliding down the western sky, setting the white stucco walls glowing gold. The water of the bay was pale blue, the sea beyond an indigo so deep it was almost black. The smell of brine and roasting chicken wrestled with the incense smoke from a wandering priest. Sailors of several races, thick-shouldered and loud-throated all of them, sat at the wide tables under the bright embroidered canopies. Braziers burned between every table, bringing the memory of summer to the winter-chill air. Marcus sat and caught the serving girl’s eye. She nodded a promise, and he leaned back in his chair.
    “We’ll need work.”
    “Yes, sir,” Yardem said.
    “And a new crew. A real one this time.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “But there will be warehouses. Come the spring, caravans going inland.”
    “There will, sir.”
    “Any thoughts, then?”
    The serving girl—a Kurtadam with the soft, pale pelt of an adolescent and gold and silver beads all down her sides—brought mugs of hot cider to them and hurried off before Marcus could pay her. Yardem lifted one. In his hands, itlooked small. He drank slowly, his brow furrowed and his ears tucked back. Behind him, the sun glowed bright enough to hurt.
    “What it is?” Marcus said.
    “The smuggler girl, sir. Cithrin.”
    Marcus laughed, but he felt the anger behind it. From the shift in Yardem’s shoulders, the Tralgu heard it too.
    “You think it would be wise to put us between that cart and whoever wants to take it from her?”
    “It wouldn’t be,” Yardem said.
    “Then what’s there to talk about? Job’s done. Time to move forward.”
    “Yes, sir,” Yardem said and took another sip. Marcus waited for him to speak. He didn’t. One of the sailors—a Firstblood with close-cropped black hair and the slushy accent of Lyoneia—started singing a dirty song about the mating habits of Southlings. The large black eyes of that race often got them called
eyeholes,
which lent itself to certain rhymes. Marcus felt his jaw clench. He leaned forward, putting himself in Yardem’s sight.
    “You have something to say?”
    Yardem sighed.
    “If she were less like Meriam, you’d have stayed,” Yardem said.
    The dirty song went to a new verse, speculating on the sex life of Dartinae and Cinnae. Or glow-worms and maggots, as the lyrics put it. Marcus shot an annoyed glance at the singer. The tightness in his jaw was spreading down his neck and between his shoulder blades. Yardem put down his cider.
    “If it had been a man driving that cart,” Yardem said. “Or an older woman. Someone who looked less like Alys orwasn’t the age Meriam would have been, you would have taken contract from them.”
    Marcus coughed out a laugh. The singer took a breath, preparing to launch into another verse. Marcus stood.
    “You! Enough of that. There’s grown men here trying to think.”
    The sailor’s face clouded.
    “Who the fuck are you?”
    “The man telling you that’s enough,” Marcus said.
    The sailor sneered, then blinked at something in Marcus’s expression, flushed red, and sat down, his back toward Marcus and Yardem. Marcus turned back to his second.
    “That cart is going to pull blades and blood to it, and we both know it,” Marcus said softly. “That much wealth in one place is a call to murder. Now you’re telling me that standing in front of it’s the right thing?”
    “No, sir. Damned foolish, sir,” Yardem said. “Only you’d have done it.”
    Marcus shook his head. In his memory, Meriam reached out from the flames. He took her dying body in his arms. He could smell the burning hair, the skin. He felt her relax against him and