The Dragon's Path

you say?” she asked.
    Master Kit turned to her, bushy eyebrows hoisted.
    “I wasn’t aware that I did,” he said.
    “You just did it again,” Cithrin said. “You never say anything straight out. It’s all
I believe
this or
I’ve found
that. You never say,
The sun rises in the morning.
It’s always,
I think the sun rises in the morning.
It’s like you’re trying not to promise anything.”
    Master Kit went sober. His dark eyes considered her. Cithrin felt a chill run down her spine, but it wasn’t fear. It was like being on the edge of finding something that she’d only guessed was there. Master Kit rubbed a palm across his chin. The sound was soft and intimate and utterly mundane.
    “I’m surprised you noticed that,” he said, then smiled at having done it again. “I have a talent for being believed, and I’ve found it to be problematic. I suppose I’ve adopted habits to soften the effect, and so I try not to assert things unless I’m certain of them. Absolutely certain, I mean. I’m often surprised by how little I’m absolutely certain of.”
    “That’s an odd choice,” Cithrin said.
    “And it encourages me to take myself lightly,” Master Kit said. “I find a certain value in lightness.”
    “I wish I could,” she said. The despair in her voice surprised her, and then she was weeping.
    The actor blinked, his arms shifting uncertainly, and Cithrin stood in the open street embarrassed by her own sobbing, but powerless to stop. Master Kit wrapped an armaround her and led her forward to the steps of the church. His cloak was cheap wool, rough and still smelling of lanolin. He draped it over her shoulders. She leaned forward, her head on her knees. She felt the fear and the sorrow, but only at a distance. But the landslide had begun, and there was nothing she could do now but let it go. Master Kit placed his hand on her back, just between her shoulder blades, and rubbed gently, like a man soothing a baby. After a while, the sobs grew less violent. The tears dried. Cithrin eventually found her voice.
    “I can’t do this,” she said. How many thousand times had she told herself that since the day Besel died? But always to herself. This was the first time she’d said the words aloud to anyone. They tasted sour. “I can’t do this.”
    Master Kit took his arm back, but still shared his rough, cheap cloak. A few of the people walking by stared, but most ignored them. The old actor’s skin smelled like a spice shop. Cithrin wanted to curl up there on the cold stone steps, sleep, and never wake up.
    “You can,” Master Kit said.
    “No, I—”
    “Cithrin, stop. Listen to my voice,” Master Kit said.
    Cithrin turned. He looked older than she remembered him, and it took a moment to realize it was because he wasn’t smiling, even in the corner of his eyes. There were pouches under his eyes. His jowls sagged, and the stubble of his beard was more white than black. Cithrin waited.
    “You can do this,” he said. “No, just listen to me. You can do this.”
    “You mean you think that I can,” she said. “Or you expect that I will.”
    “No. I meant what I said.
You can do this.
”
    Something in the back of Cithrin’s mind shifted. Somethingin her blood altered, like the surface of a pond rippling when a fish has passed too close beneath it. The overwhelming sorrow was still there, the fear that she would fail, the sense of being at the mercy of a wild and violent world. None of it went away. Only with it, there was something else. Hardly brighter than a firefly in the darkness of her mind, there was a new thought:
Perhaps.
    Cithrin rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and shook her head. The sun had shifted farther and faster than she’d expected. She didn’t know how long ago they’d left the new rooms.
    “Thank you,” she said softly.
    “I felt I owed it to you,” Master Kit said. He seemed tired.
    “Should we go back?”
    “If you’re ready, I think we should.”
    E vening came later than Cithrin expected, another sign that winter was beginning to lose its grip. Yardem Hane sat on the floor, his huge legs crossed, and ate rice and fish from a plate. Captain Wester paced.
    “If we pick the wrong ship,” the captain said, “they’ll murder us, throw our bodies to the sharks, and spend the rest of their lives living high in some port in Far Syramys or Lyoneia. But we’d only have the customs house here and the one in Carse to go past. On the road, we might