The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

condemning them. You’re condemning every person that I could have helped if you had let me.”
    Isadau folded the page and put it on her desk as gently as if it might shatter. Or she might. Cithrin waited.
    “Reckless without being stupid,” Isadau said.
    “Is that a yes?”
    “It would work better with both of us present,” Isadau said. “Send your letter. Give me the cover to work. I will stay here with you.”
    “No,” Cithrin said. “On one hand, you’re genuinely guilty and I’m not. And on the other, this is my price. You give me the bank. You leave. I help as many people get out from under the occupation as I can, and if the chance comes to do the empire some damage, all the better. But in return, you’re my first client. You and whoever else you pick will leave the city now for Birancour or Herez or Northcoast. I don’t want to know where you’re going. Only that you’re gone, and that I can’t call you back. It’s important that I be able to not lie about that.”
    Isadau bent forward slowly, her hands at her belly. She looked as if she were laughing or in pain, but she only rested there a moment, bent half over, her eyes closed and her lips in a smile that looked like pain. When she opened her eyes again, she was herself.
    “I had resigned myself to dying, you know,” she said.
    “I did,” Cithrin said, and the tears threatened to come back. “It was fucking annoying.”
    “I accept your proposal,” Isadau said. “But not for me. You took the negotiation when you held the lives of the children you could save that I couldn’t.”
    “Attacking at the base. You were justifying your plan to yourself because it was selfless,” Cithrin said. “I undermined that by pointing out that it left innocent lives on the table when my plan recovered them. And since you only had one overwhelming argument, it all came down. If you’d wanted to win, you’d have needed to show that the bank would lose less capital if you stayed or that the cost of your leaving was significantly greater than staying here and being caught.”
    “Only you’d have had arguments prepared against them.”
    “Still do, if you’re tempted,” Cithrin said.
    “Imaniel taught you well,” Isadau said.
    “So did you.”
    Magistra Isadau left the next day, going overland with Jurin, Kani, and almost half the household. They left a few minutes apart so that they might be mistaken for several unrelated groups and to keep within the dictates of the laws against assembly. Isadau was in the last group to go. She wore a simple traveling gown with a split skirt for riding and a hood she had plucked up to hide her face. Astride her little mule, she looked more like a hardland farmer than the voice of the most powerful bank in the world. Cithrin walked beside her to the gate. In the street, four Antean soldiers were laughing and kicking stones down the road like boys. One looked over when the gate opened, but his expression was bored.
    “Thank you, Cithrin,” Isadau said. “Please save what you can, but don’t die here. Not for me.”
    “I’m in this war to win,” Cithrin said. “If you see Pyk or Komme, tell them what we discussed about putting up a bounty system. I’ll see you again when I see you.”
    Isadau urged the little mule on, and Enen closed the gate behind her. Cithrin turned to look at the compound. When she’d come here, it had been a strange, threatening place. Now it was in fact a thousand greater threat to her life, and she didn’t fear it at all. This was her place now. Her word was the word of the bank, and it had the force of gold and Komme Medean behind it.
    “Nicely done, ma’am,” Yardem said.
    “Thank you. Now let’s go about not regretting it, shall we?”
    “Yes, ma’am. There’s the matter of the letter to the Lord Regent.”
    “I know. Call for a courier and we’ll send it. But I need to write one other first.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    In Magistra Isadau’s office—Cithrin’s office now—she sat at the desk and gathered her thoughts. The breeze through the windows was chilly, and she kept her cloak on. The flames from the lamp only warmed the air a little. The refugees Isadau had taken in still made music that carried through the afternoon air. The kitchens still filled the world with the scents of baking bread and roasting meat. One might almost imagine it had always been like this, and that it would always be.
    She took a clean sheet of paper, a brass-nibbed pen, and a jar