The Dragon's Path

have to weather half a dozen tax collectors.”
    Cithrin looked at her own plate of fish, her belly too knotted to eat. Every word Wester said made it worse.
    “We could backtrack,” Yardem said. “Go to the Free Cities, and north from there. Or back to Vanai, for that.”
    “Without a caravan to hide in?” Marcus said.
    The Tralgu shrugged, conceding the point. Behind theconstant motion of the captain’s legs, the wax-sealed books of the Vanai bank glowed in the candlelight. Cithrin’s anxiety circled back to them, images of cracked seal and rotting leather spines dancing through her head like a nightmare that wouldn’t fade.
    “We could buy a fishing boat,” Yardem said. “Sail it ourselves. Hug the coast.”
    “Fighting off pirates with our forceful personalities?” Marcus said. “Cabral is half rotten with free ships stealing the trade they can, and King Sephan isn’t about to stop them.”
    “No good options,” Yardem said.
    “None. And weeks still before we can take the bad ones,” Marcus said.
    Cithrin put her plate on the ground and walked past Captain Wester. She took the topmost of the books, looked around the dim, gold-lit room, and found the short blade Yardem had used to carve cheese at midday. The blade was shining clean.
    “What are you doing?” Marcus asked.
    “I can’t choose the right ship,” Cithrin said, “or the right path, or a caravan to hide in. But I can see that the books aren’t wet, so I’m doing that.”
    “We’ll just have to seal them again,” Marcus said, and Cithrin ignored him. The wax was as thick as her thumb, and came off in stubborn chunks. A layer of cloth beneath it gave way to a softer inner layer of wax, and then parchment wrapping. The book hidden inside it all could have been fresh from Magister Imaniel’s desk. Cithrin opened it, and the pages hissed against each other. The familiar marks of Magister Imaniel’s handwriting were like a memory from childhood, and Cithrin almost wept again seeing them. Herfingers traced sums and notations, balances, transactions, details of contract and return rate. Magister Imaniel’s signature and the brown, cracked blood of his thumb. She let them wash over her, familiar and foreign at the same time. Here was the deposit the bank had taken from the bakers’ guild, and there in blue ink, a record of the payments made as recompense, month by month, for the years they’d held the money. She turned the page. Here was the record of loss on shipping insurance from the year that the storms had come up from Lyoneia later than ever before. The sums shocked her. She hadn’t guessed that the loss had been so profound. She closed the book, took her blade, and found another. Marcus and Yardem were still talking, but they could have been in another city for all it mattered to her.
    The next book was older, and she followed the history of the bank in it, from the letters of foundation that began it through the years of transactions, almost until the day she’d left. The history of Vanai written in numbers and ciphered notes. And there, in red, a small notation of Cithrin bel Sarcour accepted as ward of the Medean bank until she reached legal age and took over the balance of her parents’ deposits, less the costs of keeping her. There were as many words spent on a grain shipment or investment in a brewery. The death of her parents, the beginning of the only life she’d known, all on a single line.
    She got another book.
    Marcus stopped talking, ate his dinner, and curled up on the cot. The half moon rose. Cithrin traced the history of the bank like she was reading old letters sent from home. Wax and cloth and parchment mounded around her like wrapping paper. Growing in the back of her mind, almost forgotten in the fascination of old ink and dusty paper, wasa sense of possibility. Not confidence—not yet—but its precursor.
    It was only when Yardem woke her by taking the leather-bound book from her hand that she realized that—for the first time since Opal—she’d slept dreamless through the night.

Dawson
     
    R ough, plank-board ladders and improvised stairways lined the sides of the Division, clinging to the ancient ruins like lichen to a stone. High above, the great bridges spanned the gap with stone and steel and dragon’s jade: Silver Bridge, Autumn Bridge, Stone Bridge, and almost lost in the haze the Prisoner’s Span hung with cages and straps. Lower, where the sides came close enough, rope lines swung