“It seems I owe you my thanks,” Dawson said. To his surprise, he was out of breath.
The new man shook his head.
“I should have come sooner, my lord,” the young man said. “I stayed too far back.”
“Too far back?” Dawson said. “You’ve been tracking me?”
The man nodded and would not meet his eyes.
“Why is that?” Dawson asked.
“Your lady wife, my lord,” the man said. “She took me into service after you turned me out. She tasked me with keeping you safe, sir. I’m afraid I’ve done a poor job.”
Of course. The huntsman from the kitchens who’d returned the bit of horn soaked in dog’s blood and insult. Vincen Coe, the name had been. He’d never asked Clara what she’d done to see to the boy, but of course she couldn’t simply reinstate him over her husband’s express words. And certainly it would be beneath him to say he’d been unjust with the boy.
“You’re mistaken,” Dawson said.
“Lord?”
“I’ve never seen you before, and I wouldn’t have turned a man of your courage and talent out of my service.”
“Yes… I mean, no, my lord.”
“That’s settled, then. Come along with me, we’ll get these little scratches daubed.”
Coe stood.
“My sword, my lord?”
“Yes. We may have need of that,” Dawson said, gesturing to where it lay, grimed with blood and snow and soot. “It seems I’m frightening all the right men.”
F
ire and blood. Merian shrieked her pain and fear and indignation as only a child could blend them. Her eyes were fixed on him, her arms reaching out. Marcus fought his paralysis, forced his arms to reach for her, and in moving them, woke himself.
The screams of the dead lingered in the cool air as he lifted himself up, still expecting in his half-dream to see the wheat fields and high, stately windmills of Ellis. Instead, the wide star-crowded sky of Birancour arched above him, the looming darkness of the mountains behind him to the east without even the suggestion of dawn. The burning smell of memory gave way to the sweet, astringent scent of ice lily and the distant presentiment of salt that was the sea.
He lay back in his bedroll and waited for the dream to fade. By long habit, he attended to his body. The constricting tightness in his throat eased first, then in his chest. The gut-punch ache in his belly faded slowly and vanished. Soon there was only the permanent hollow beneath his ribs, and he knew it was safe to stand.
They were battle scars. Some men lost a leg or a hand. Some men lost their eyes. Marcus had lost a family. And just as old soldiers knew when rain was coming from the ache of healed bones, he suffered now. It didn’t mean anything. It was just his own private bad weather, and like bad weather,
it would pass. It was only for the moment that the dreams were getting worse.
The caravan slept, carters and mules both, in the deep night. The watch fire glittered on the hillside above him, no brighter than a star, but orange instead of blue. Marcus made his way toward it. The dry grass hushed against his boots and field mice skittered away. Yardem Hane sat silhouetted by the small fire, back turned to keep the light from blunting his eyes. Beside him sat a less familiar form. Marcus moved close enough to make out their words.
“The
shape
of a soul?” Master Kit asked. “I think I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Just that. A soul has a shape,” Yardem said. His wide hands patted the air in front of him. “And fate is formed by it. Whatever the world delivers to you, the shape of your soul determines what you do with it, and the actions you take make your destiny.”
Marcus turned his foot, scraping the ground loud enough to announce himself.
“Morning, Captain,” Yardem said without turning to look.
“You filling our cunning man’s head with your superstitious hairwash?”
“I am, sir.”
“Be careful, Kit,” Marcus said, walking into the dim circle of light. “Yardem used to be a priest, you know.”
Master Kit’s eyebrows rose and he looked his question from Marcus to Yardem. The Tralgu shrugged eloquently.
“Ended poorly,” Yardem said.
“It’s not a faith I’d heard of before,” Master Kit said. “I have to say I find the ideas fascinating. What shape is your own soul?”
“I’ve never seen my soul,” Yardem said.
Marcus sat. The warmth of the fire touched his back. High above them, a falling star streaked from east to west, fading almost before Marcus saw it. The silence felt suddenly awkward.
“Go ahead,” Marcus said. “Tell him if you want to.”
“Tell me what?” Master Kit asked.
“I have seen the captain’s. I was at Wodford the day of the battle. The captain rode by, taking count of the troop, and… I saw it.”
“And what shape was it?” Master Kit asked
“A circle standing on its edge,” Yardem said.
“What did you take that to mean?”
“That he rises when brought low and falls when placed high,” Yardem said.
“He needed magical visions to see that,” Marcus said. “Most people just take it as given.”
“But always?” Master Kit said. “Surely if God wanted to change the shape of a man’s soul—”
“I’ve never seen God,” Yardem said.
“But you believe in him,” Master Kit said.
“I’m reserving judgment,” Yardem said. Master Kit considered that.
“And what about you, Captain?” he asked. “Stories are you were a pious man once.”
“I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said.
“Charity toward whom?”
“Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,” Marcus said. “Do we have any food left?”
The dawn crept in softly, the outline of the mountains to the east growing clearer against the stars, then the few
finger-thin clouds began to glow pink and gold and light seemed to come from nowhere, to rise up from the earth like a mist. The carts changed from near-invisible hulks to wood and iron. Pot metal clanked from across the camp as the caravan master’s wife began cooking the morning’s mash of stewed grain and honeyed pork. The landscape changed from endless featureless darkness to hills and trees, scrub and stream. Yardem ran the guards through their morning drills while Marcus walked through the camp and pretended there was no cart in the caravan he cared about more than another.
The girl, Cithrin, followed the same routine as the others. She cared for her mules, she ate her food, she scraped the mud out of her axle holes. If she needed help, she asked Opal or Master Kit. Never the caravan master, never Marcus himself. But never Sandr either, and the boy had been avoiding her like his life depended on it, so that was for the best. Marcus watched her without being obvious. She’d gotten better since they’d left Vanai. Since they’d left Bellin, for that. But there were dark pouches under her eyes and the awkwardness of exhaustion in her movements.
Marcus found the caravan master squatting beside the lead cart, a wide scroll of inked parchment on the dirt before him: a map of south Birancour probably centuries out of date, but it would still show where the dragon’s roads were. His wife, breakfast duties finished, was putting their team in harness.
“Day,” the caravan master said. “Day and a half at most, and we’ll get onto a real road again.”
“That’s good.”
“Another three, and we’ll be in Porte Oliva. You’ve been there before?”
“A time or two,” Marcus said. “It’s a good winter port. Doesn’t get too cold. The queen’s governor isn’t too heavy a tax hand.”
“We’ll stop there, then.”
“Roads should be clear to Carse by early spring,” Marcus said.
“Not for me,” the caravan master said, folding the map. “We reach Porte Oliva, and we’re done. The ’van stops there.”
Marcus frowned and crossed his arms.
“There are some problems with that,” he said. “The job is to see all this to Carse.”
“Your job is to protect the caravan,” the Timzinae said. “Mine is to say where it goes and when it stops. Porte Oliva has a market. Road trade to Cabral and Herez, not to mention the rest of the cities in Birancour. Ships to Lyoniea, and the blue-water trade to Far Syramys. The cargo I was contracted to haul will sell well enough there.”
“The cargo you were contracted for,” Marcus repeated, turning the words over like they tasted wrong.
“Is there something else I should care about?” The caravan master’s chin jutted forward. “You’re worried I might inconvenience the smuggler?”
“Last I heard, the Medean bank doesn’t trade in Birancour,” Marcus said. “You’ll be sitting that girl on a pile of money high as a tree with nothing to protect her. Might as well hang a sign on her neck.”
The ’van master tossed his folded map on the seat of his cart and began hauling himself up beside it. His wife blinked a silent apology to Marcus and looked away.
“
That girl
and her drinking and smuggling and sinning with your guardsmen can watch out for herself,” the ’van master said. “We were blind lucky with that Antean bastard.
There’s no reason to expect we’ll be as fortunate next time.”
And there will be a next time,
he didn’t say. He didn’t need to.
“If you take my advice,” the ’van master went on, “you’ll take your fee, turn your horse, and ride away from that girl until she’s less than a memory. People like that are only trouble.”
Marcus bristled.
“What kind of people do you mean?”
“Bankers,” the ’van master said, and spat.
P
orte Oliva nestled on a land spur that pressed out into a wide, shallow bay. Even at low tide, the sea protected her on three sides. Reefs and sandbars made the approach from the ocean dangerous enough that local boatmen could earn their living guiding ships from the deep ocean safely into port and then out again. In the thousand years since its foundation, the city had never been taken by force, though twice it had been seduced. The dragon’s road led to it, the green pathway curving up over hills long since washed away, so that the carts traveled across the tops of wide-sloping arches as the ground dropped away beneath them.
As they drew nearer the city, the road became more crowded. Where Vanai had been rich with the black-chitined Timzinae, the crowd here showed the pale, ethereal faces of Cinnae and the oily, short, bead-adorned fur of Kurtadam in greater numbers even than Firstblood. The press of carts and bodies thickened, and Marcus started to see swordsmen in with copper torcs and the green and gold of Birancour. Queensmen. The guardians of the city, though the queen herself kept to the greater cities of Sara-su-mar and Porte Silena in the north. Marcus watched the caravan master
approach one of the older queensmen, lean forward as if to speak above the chirr and murmur of the crowd. A few coins traded hands, and without any obvious change, the carts soon found themselves moving faster than before, passing the foot traffic and hand barrows. Marcus knew they had reached the Porte Oliva proper when the beggars and mendicants appeared.
Please, my lord, I have a child.
My husband is a sailor. His ship is three months late, and there’s no money for food.
God tells us to be generous.
Marcus paced alongside the carts, ignoring the words and gestures, watching for the thieves and cutpurses who always lived in crowds like these. The other guards followed his example, and likely knew more about sleight of hand than he did. It was odd how well suited the players were to every part of guarding a ’van besides the actual guard duty. He reached the last cart and turned to start for the front again. Three carts ahead, Master Kit leaned down and pressed a coin into an old man’s hand.
“Don’t encourage them,” Marcus called. “They’re all liars.”
“Not all, Captain,” Kit called back with a grin. “Only most.”
He passed the wool cart where the smuggler girl, still in her rough carter’s clothes, drove her team. Put beside the full-blood Cinnae on the road, it was easier to see her as something besides a frail Firstblood girl. Her hair wasn’t as fine as theirs, her features were thicker, her skin had more color, but the resemblance was there. She noticed him watching her, and tried out a smile. He ignored her with the same studied intention as the beggars, and for similar reasons.
Riding on, the sense of anticipation and dread sat in his gut. The conversation would come, and it would be today, and the wise thing—the right thing, the thing that would let his nightmares fade again—was to refuse the girl. At the lead cart, Yardem met his gaze impassively.
Once, centuries before, the city had ended at the great stone embattlements. Now the towering white stone walls were in the middle of a busy market quarter. Fishmongers shouted out their catch on the north side of the arched tunnel that led to the inner city, and after they passed through, indistinguishable men and women called out the same fish. The architecture of war slept in the middle of a living community like a great hunting cat torpid from the kill. Beyond it, the dragon’s road widened and stopped at a huge open square.
The crowd pressed here as thick as they had on the road. A great marble temple high as five men standing one atop the other loomed on the eastern end, the governor’s palace of red brick and colored glass on the west. God’s voice and the law’s arm, twin powers of the throne. And between them, scattered through the square, wooden platforms rose with prisoners suffering their punishments. A Kurtadam man with rheumy eyes and severed hands held a sign between his stumps announcing himself a thief. A Firstblood woman smeared in shit and offal sat under the carved wooden symbol of a procuress. Three Cinnae men hung dead from a gallows, flies darkening the soft flesh around their eyes; a murderer, a rapist, and a child-user respectively. Together, the platforms served as a short, effective introduction to the local laws.