“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 squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could play the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.
On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.
At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.
The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.
“Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.
Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.
“It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”
“The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”
“Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.
“It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”
“We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to stop.”
“The dragons, I mean,” Geder said. “Here, look.”
Cithrin came and sat beside them as Geder drew out the problem fresh. Morade was a dot in the center, his clutchmates were set one on either side. And three stones were the places Drakkis Stormcrow might be hiding: Firehold, Matter, and Rivercave. The puzzle gave each of the dragons rules on how they could move and in which order, and the puzzle was to find how Morade could check all three hiding places while blocking his clutch-mates.
“What if Stormcrow’s in the first one?” Cithrin asked.
“No, you don’t ever find him,” Geder said. “It’s only to look in all three places.”
“What if…” Aster reached for the little improvised board and tried a series of moves that didn’t work. Cithrin left them to it, opening the pack and putting everything out where she could locate it again by touch. The candle wasn’t going to last all the way to nightfall. Not that day or night meant much in the darkness.