The Dragon's Path

follow. If I give the sign…”
    “We’ll start singing,” Cary said, and then, to Cithrin, “Shoulders back, sister mine. We’re here to be seen.”
    “Yardem?” Marcus said as the Tralgu hefted a dead man.
    “Sir?”
    “The day you throw me in a ditch and take the company?”
    “I am the company, sir.”
    “Fair point.”
    They slipped into the darkness. The cold was bitter, and Marcus’s breath fogged before him. The cobbles seemed made from ice, and the smell of death came from the cart, low and coppery and familiar as his own name. At his side, Master Kit pulled, the man’s breath coming fast as panting. The living carried the dead through the black streets, guided by starlight and memory. Drying blood caked Marcus’s side, plucking at his wounds with every step. He pressed himself forward. It seemed like a slow eternity, pain in his fingers giving way to numbness, and then pain again. Behind him, he heard Cary’s voice suddenly rise in bawdy song, and then, like a river reed playing harmony to a trumpet, Cithrin’s voice with hers. He looked over his shoulder. A block behind them, their lanterns held high above them, two scantily dressed women faced a patrol of queensmen. Marcus stopped, the handcart slowing as he dropped from the lead.
    “Captain,” Master Kit whispered urgently.
    “This is idiocy,” Marcus said. “This isn’t your comedy, and that street’s not a stage. Those are men with swords and power. Putting women in front of them and hoping for the best is—”
    “What we’ve done, Captain,” Master Kit said. “It’s what we’ve done, and this is why. You should pull the cart now.”
    In the light of the lanterns, Cary twirled once, laughing. One of the queensmen draped a cloak over Cithrin’s shoulders. Marcus realized he’d drawn his knife without knowing it.
They can’t be trusted,
Marcus thought, looking at theguardians of civil peace in their cloaks of green and gold.
You can’t trust them.
    “Captain?” Yardem asked.
    “Go. Keep going,” Marcus said and forced himself to turn away.
    The break in the seawall was on the far eastern edge of the city. A stone walkway white with snow and gull droppings and black with ice and night looked out over an invisible ocean. Gulls nested in cracks in the walls around them and on the cliffs below. And there, a single crack, no wider than a doorway where the city had constructed a siege weapon long since turned to rust to defend it against an enemy as dead as the bodies Marcus hauled.
    They moved quickly and in silence. Yardem strode to the edge and lofted the corpse from his shoulder and into the grey predawn mist. Then Smit and Hornet, like men helping a drunken companion over the threshold. Then, together, the handcart with its human cargo. And last, Sandr and Opal, the woman limping under the weight of her burden, came to the edge. The last of the knife men vanished. There was no splash. Only the hush of the wind, the complaints of the birds, and faraway muttering of the surf.
    “Yardem,” Marcus said. “Get back to the rooms. I’ll find Cithrin.”
    “Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said, and vanished into the gloom.
    “We’ll need money to pay their fines,” Smit said. “Can we afford that?”
    “Seems wrong to charge them for public lewdness,” Sandr said. “Most places you have to pay extra for it.”
    “I think we can do what we must,” Master Kit said shortly. “You all go back to the cart. I believe the captain and I have some last business. Opal, please stay with us.”
    The players stood for a moment and then walked slowlyaway. Marcus listened to their footsteps fade. Sandr said something, and Smit replied darkly. Marcus couldn’t make out the words. Master Kit and Opal stood, deeper black in the gloom all around. Marcus wished he could see their faces, and was also glad that he couldn’t.
    “I can’t take her to the queensmen,” Marcus said.
    “I know,” Master Kit said.
    “I didn’t tell anyone else,” Opal said. “The only people who know about the banker girl’s fortune are the ones who knew before.”
    “Unless one of your swimming friends down there told someone,” Marcus said.
    “Unless that,” Opal admitted.
    “It seems to me there are only two choices here, Captain. You won’t appeal to the city’s justice. Either Opal walks free, or she doesn’t.”
    “That’s truth,” Marcus said.
    “I would very much like you to let her walk away,” Master Kit said. “She’s already