The King's Blood

enthusiasms. And the almost physical shared sorrow that neither one of them acknowledged, or even recognized. When they rose out of the ground, they would leave her, and her chance to learn more of them both would vanish.
    “I’ll talk to Geder about it,” she said, scooping up the last of the barley with two cupped fingers. “Anything else?”
    “The usual human landscape of lies and folly,” Cary said. “Did you know that Geder commands the spirits of the dead, and that at night ghosts stalk the streets rooting out his enemies?”
    “He hadn’t mentioned that,” Cithrin said. “Good to know. All right, then. If that’s all—”
    Mikel grinned.
    “Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact…”
    Cithrin lifted her eyebrows.
    “You always do that,” Charlit Soon said. “That’s exactly what I was talking about with A Tragedy of Tarsk. You always play the pause for effect.”
    “Has an effect,” Smit said.
    “Yeah,” Charlit Soon said, “it prolongs and annoys.” She tossed a pebble at Mikel.
    “As a matter of fact,” Cithrin prompted.
    “As a matter of fact,” Mikel said, somewhat abashed, “I found where your Paerin Clark’s been hiding. Went to ground in a guesthouse of Canl Daskellin’s, which was a pretty good idea since the inn you were staying in burned.”
    “It burned?” Cithrin said.
    “Fourth night after,” Cary said.
    “My clothes were in there,” Cithrin said.
    “Twelve people were in there,” Sandr said. “Two of them children.”
    Cithrin considered Sandr. There had been a time not all that long ago when she’d very nearly taken him as a lover. From where she sat now, the wisdom of her decision not to glowed like a fire in the night.
    “Yes, I am a small, petty woman,” she said, “and I mourn for the dead and the suffering, but I really wanted to get my own damn clothes back. Can you reach Paerin, or is he as guarded as the priest?”
    “He’s not taking visitors he doesn’t know,” Mikel said.
    “All right,” Cithrin said. “I’ll need something to write on.”
    The company cipher was still clear in her mind, and the note was a brief one: Have access to Lord Regent and Prince Aster. What questions do I ask? Reply by same courier . She considered adding something that would say where she was, where Geder and Aster were, and she didn’t. If he wanted Geder and Aster, he could come to her.
    It was one of the great and powerful lessons of finance. The key to wealth and power was simple enough to state and difficult to employ: be between things. Narinisle was a chilly island with barely enough arable land to support its own population and no particular resources to offer, but the currents of the Ocean Sea put it between Far Syramys and the rest of the continent. And so it was vastly wealthy. Now Cithrin had fallen into Narinisle’s position, and while it wouldn’t last, she could gain more the longer she remained in place.
    “All right,” she said, handing the paper to Mikel. “I’ll come back as soon as I can for the reply.”
    “How are things going underground?” Cary asked.
    “Frightened and bored and ready to be done with this. But we let Aster sneak up to the mouth and look out at the daylight. It seems to help.”
    “Good. When this is over, though, I hope the Lord Regent remembers who his friends are. I’m almost through all the stones the prince brought with him.”
    “Really?”
    “I could buy more with a ripe orange than with one of those pearls,” Cary said. “It’s already starvation time in some quarters. If this all doesn’t break soon, we’ll start seeing a lot more people dying. And they won’t be lords and nobles falling in glorious battle.”
    When there was nothing more to be said, Cithrin pulled a sack over her shoulder with four fresh wineskins, a palmsized round of hard cheese, a bottle of water, some stale bread, and a double handful of dried cherries harvested at least a year before and hard as pebbles. She paused before she started the walk back, looking out over the Division.
    The air was hazy, the far side of the span already a bit greyer than things closer to hand. Nothing was burning at the moment, but there was no reason to expect that would be true through the night, for instance.
    She hadn’t been there for a half a season, but Camnipol had gone from the heart of an empire to a city of scars. It was in the scorch marks on the buildings and the faces of the men she passed in the streets, the empty market