The Dragon's Path

catching the firelight. The occupants of the high table had shifted, making room for the show, and Geder could see Alan Klin clearly now. Through the flurry of knives, he imagined there was an uneasiness about the man’s shoulders. A false cheerfulness in his smiles and laughter. A haunted look to the bright eyes. And if it was true, then he—Geder Palliako—had put them there. And what was more, Klin would never know. Never follow back the ripples.
    Geder laughed and clapped and pretended he was watching the performance.

Cithrin
     
    A fter the night skating on the mill pond and the throat-closing fear of the day that came after, her nights took on a pattern. First, bone-deep exhaustion. Then, after she curled into the wool, a glorious hour of rest before her eyes popped open, her mind racing, her heart tight and nervous. Some nights, she would see the doughy Antean nobleman finding the hidden chests again, only this time he shouted out, and his soldiers came. Her mind spun through nightmare images of what had almost been. Sandr killed. Opal slaughtered. Master Kit riddled with arrows, his blood bright on the snow. Marcus Wester handing her over to the soldiers in exchange for the caravan’s safe passage. And then what the soldiers might have done to her. That it hadn’t happened gave the fear an almost spiritual power, as if her near escape had incurred a debt whose payment might be heavier than she could bear.
    She fought back with memories of Magister Imaniel, the bank, the balances of trade and insurance, intrigue and subtle design that reminded her of home. It didn’t bring rest, but it made the cold, dark, wakeful hours bearable, letting her pretend the world followed rules and could be tamed. Then the eastern sky would brighten, and the exhaustion would fall over her like a worked-metal coat, and she’d force herself up, out, and through another impossible day. By thetime they reached Porte Oliva, she was living half in a waking dream. Small red animals shifted and danced in the corner of her vision, and the most improbable ideas—she had to swallow all the books to keep them safe, Master Kit could grow wings but didn’t want anyone to know, Cary secretly planned to kill her in a jealous rage over Sandr—took on a plausibility they hadn’t earned.
    Everything she knew of Porte Oliva, she knew at second hand. She knew it sat at Birancour’s southern edge and survived on what trade from the east didn’t stop at the Free Cities and what from the west made the extra journey to avoid the pirates haunting Cabral. The greatest part of its wealth came as a wayport between Lyoneia and Narinisle. Magister Imaniel had called it everybody’s second choice, but he’d said it as if that might not be such a bad role to play. She’d imagined it as a city of rough edges and local prides.
    Her arrival itself had been uncanny. She remembered driving her team along hilly, snow-blown roads, and then a Kurtadam boy, sleek as an otter, trotted alongside her cart, his hand outstretched, asking her for coins, and a forest of buildings had sprouted around her. Porte Oliva was the first real city she’d seen apart from Vanai, stone where Vanai was wood, salt where Vanai was freshwater. Her first impressions of it were a blur of narrow streets with high white arches, the smells of shit and sea salt, the voices of full-blooded Cinnae chattering like finches. She thought they’d passed through a tunnel in a great wall, like the old stories of dead men passing from one life to another, but it was just as likely she’d dreamed it.
    She remembered nothing about how she’d hired Marcus Wester and his second as her personal guard. Not even why she’d thought it was a good idea.
    The captain padded across the stone floor. From the cotagainst the wall, Yardem Hane snored. Cithrin let herself swim up from her nap and survey the dank little rooms again for the hundredth time. A small fire in the grate muttered, casting red-and-orange shadows on the far wall and belching pine smoke into the air. The window was scraped parchment, and it dirtied what sunlight it let in. The boxes—contents of the cart she’d carried so carefully from Vanai—were stacked along the walls like any cheap warehouse. Only the most valuable of the cart’s contents had been put in the sunken iron strongbox. Hardly a tenth of what they carried would fit. Cithrin sat up. Her body felt bruised, but her head was almost clear.
    “Morning,” Marcus