“Why not?”
“It’s night. Someone might see.”
Geder lit the candle, and the woman slipped down into the buried garden. Her hair was pulled back in a fierce pony-tail, and grime and dust covered her hands and knees. Her skin, pale as a wraith, seemed almost to glow in the candlelight. With the thinness of her mixed blood, she seemed fragile, weak. It was only the way she held herself and the confidence of her movements that gave that the lie. If she’d been a Firstblood, he would have thought she was little more than a girl, at least from the smoothness of her skin. But she was the magistra of a bank, and likely older than he was. A woman who traveled the world. She knelt, untying the rope at her ankle, and pulled. The tray skidded and scraped as she pulled it toward them.
“The news isn’t good,” she said softly so as not to wake Aster. “There’s still fighting in the streets. Some of it’s private guards and noble houses, but there are looters too. Gangs of them. If it looks like a nobleman’s house is standing empty, they’ll strip it to the walls. And there seem to be some old vendettas coming due. Five men in masks took away a merchant named Deron Root and threw him off a bridge this afternoon, and no one seems to know why.”
“What about Basrahip?”
“The temple’s scorched, but it’s still standing. Mikel and Sandr didn’t find anyone there, but they didn’t find any bodies either. Some got killed, there doesn’t seem much question. There are also stories that people have seen the priests about, but so far we haven’t found any.”
He sat forward, shaking his head. The tension in his shoulders ached. It was all too much. It was falling apart. And if he didn’t have Basrahip or Dawson either, he couldn’t imagine what he would do if he ever rose back up out of the earth.
“What about the city guard?” he asked. “What are they doing?”
Cithrin reached into the darkness of the crawlway, grunting, and pulled the tray back with her.
“They’ve got their hands full,” she said. “There’s no law out there right now. Honestly? We three are probably the safest people in Camnipol tonight.”
“Unless your friends betray us,” he said.
“Unless that,” she agreed, taking something wrapped in cloth from the tray and setting it on the ground at her feet. “They’re not likely to, though.”
“Why not?” Geder said, thinking of Dawson Kalliam’s face again. The blood on his knife. “Any of them could. Why wouldn’t they?”
“One of them did before,” she said. “They saw how that ended.”
She took a jar down from the tray, and then three wineskins. The last thing on the tray was a tin chamberpot that she held up in the candlelight with a rueful smile.
“Very nearly forgot the necessities,” she said. “Do you think we set up the tree over there as the privacy room, or should we push in and see if we can’t find someplace a bit farther from nose range.”
Geder tried to imagine relieving himself where she could hear him, and his blush felt hot.
“Farther in would be better, don’t you think?”
“All right,” she said. “The first one who needs it picks the place.”
By the light of the single candle she unwrapped the cloth. There was enough food for several small meals: roasted chicken, raw carrots no thicker than her fingers, half a rabbit boiled in wine, hard rolls so stale they sounded hollow when she knocked them together. They sat together in the gloom. She drank wine with the certainty of long acquaintance, and Geder found himself pushing to keep up. When the last of the chicken was reduced to bones and gristle, they had just cracked the third wineskin’s neck, and from the way she held it, he was certain it would be empty before she slept.
Aster snored gently in his blankets and murmured to himself.
“He’s taking all this well,” Cithrin said, nodding toward the sleeping boy.
“He puts up a good front,” Geder said. “It’s been hard for him, though. He lost his mother young, and now his father. Add the weight of the crown.”
“It doesn’t seem fair that being born to the throne should make things so much harder,” she said. “You’d think power would have more to recommend it.”
“What? You don’t think things are going well?” he asked. She didn’t laugh for a moment, and he was relieved when she did.
“I assume this is an aberration for you, Lord Regent,” she said. “But you’ve grown up noble, just like the prince. You understand what he’s carrying.”
“I really don’t. I mean, I suppose I’m in the same place with him now, but I was very low before. He’s known from the time he could talk that he was destined for the throne. I’ve known I was going to have a tiny little holding in a valley with too many trees and not enough farmland.”