The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

it.”
    In the trees at the compound’s edge, an owl launched itself up against the stars, a shadow moving on darkness. Yardem traced its arc with eyes and ears, and Cithrin followed it by following him. The silence between them was calm, companionable. Cithrin put her small hand over the back of his.
    “I hate it here,” she said. “I have never hated anyplace as much as here.”
    “I know.”
    “It is obvious? I try not to let it show.”
    “I’ve known you a while,” Yardem said.
    “They’re all so kind, and all I can feel is how little I belong with them. Magistra Isadau? She’s like a good witch from a children’s story. She’s sweet and she’s wise and she wants the best from me, and it makes my skin crawl. I keep thinking that I wouldn’t know it if she hated me. God knows she’d treat me just as well.”
    A falling star streaked overhead, there and then gone.
    “I knew a man once,” Yardem said. “Good fighter, pleasant to keep watch with. The sort of man who’d have done well in a company. Might have gotten as far as running one if he’d kept at it. Only he’d spent his whole youth as a slave. He’d do well enough when we were on campaign, but when we were done and he had time and money of his own and no one telling him what to do? He didn’t know how to act.”
    “How did he deal with it?”
    “At first, the captain tried keeping him back, giving him duties even while the other men went out and drank themselves poor. Treated the boy like he was still enslaved. That worked for a time, but in the end it wasn’t enough. It took the boy a season to manage it, but the magistrates stripped his freedom and sold him to a farmer.”
    “That’s sad.”
    “Is it?”
    An insect landed on Cithrin, its legs struggling against the fine, pale hair of her forearm. She flicked it away.
    “We say our souls want joy, but they don’t,” she said. “They want what they already know, joyful or not.”
    Yardem grunted as if he’d taken a blow to the gut and pulled his hand away from her to scratch an itch she doubted was really there.
    “What about you?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
    “Should.”
    “But you can’t.”
    “Apparently not.”
    “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
    “The war, partly. The word in the trade has it that Antea is stretched tight as a drumskin. Wore themselves thin last year, and on the edge of falling apart. Except there’s other stories too.”
    “You can’t say that and not tell,” Cithrin said. “I’d fire you.”
    “They’re saying that the spirits of the dead march with the Antean army. And that the birds and dogs all start running away before their army comes the way they do from a fire. Makes it sound as if there’s something uncanny about the Lord Regent, like he’s some sort of cunning man.”
    “Geder’s not a cunning man,” Cithrin said. “He’s … he’s just a man of too little wisdom and too much power.”
    “You sound sad for him.”
    “No,” she said. “He burned my city. Killed the people who raised and looked after me. I lived with him for weeks. Took comfort in him. I don’t think there’s a word for what he and I are to each other.”
    “Do you love him?”
    “Are you drunk ?”
    “You took comfort in him,” Yardem said. “For some people—”
    “He got anxious, I didn’t say no. What’s love got to do with that?”
    “Nothing,” Yardem agreed. “Only there are people who don’t see it that way.”
    “They’re fools,” Cithrin said, without rancor. And then, “You said partly. What’s the other part?”
    “I don’t know where the captain is. What he’s doing. There’s no word of him anywhere. It … bothers me.”
    “I wish he was still here too.”
    “Not sure I said that, ma’am,” Yardem said ruefully. “I’d hoped to know where he went and what he did. The captain and I didn’t part on the best terms. People who betray him don’t tend to end well, and there’s a good chance he feels I betrayed him.”
    “Then he’s a fool too,” Cithrin said.
    Yardem didn’t answer.

Geder
    W ell, you know how it is,” Geder’s father said, scratching at his belly. “Rivenhalm in winter. Spent a fair part of the season listening to the ice crack. Not a great deal more going on. Though this might amuse you, hey? You remember old Jeyup the weirkeeper? The one with the crooked nose?”
    “Yes, of course,” Geder said, though the truth of it was that he had only a vague