“Oh,” Geder said, looking down at himself. “I am. I’m sorry about that too. But if you’ll wait, just a few minutes.”
“There will be better days for it, my lord,” Cithrin said. For a heartstopping moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he only bowed much more deeply than the head of an empire should ever do before a banker. The looks of surprise and outrage traveled out from him like a ripple in a pond, but she only kept her smile in place as he made his way back toward the Kingspire. When she turned to leave, Canl Daskellin’s daughter was looking at her like the promise of an early death. Cithrin bowed to her as well, and took Paerin Clark by the arm.
The crowd re-formed, high men scraping mud off their best leather boots, and the tittering and laughter and scandalized eyebrows swarming among them. Cithrin cursed quietly under her breath, repeating a nearly silent string of obscenities until they were nearly at the cart. She was embarrassed. She was horrified. And more deeply than any of the rest, she found she was afraid. Afraid in particular of Geder Palliako.
The carter started them off into the press of the street. No one was moving quickly. It could take them hours to get back to their rooms. Cithrin wished deeply for a way to clear their path, and not just here on the street.
“So,” Paerin Clark said. “Did all of that mean something?”
“It meant it’s time for us to get out of Camnipol,” Cithrin said.
Marcus
I
t had been years since Marcus had traveled the coast of Elassae. He’d forgotten how beautiful it was. Just after Newport, the ground became rough, the coastline ragged and craggy. Mountains rose up, dead volcanoes with caldera lakes. They marched along north to south like soldiers marching into the sea. The string of islands leading south into the Inner Sea was their heads as they sank deeper and deeper. The water had none of the greenish tint and cloudiness of the colder climes. Sailing a boat on these waters would be like taking wing and flying.
There was no dragon’s road along this coast, or rather there were rumors that once there had been one, and the spill of the molten rock had covered it over back before the volcanoes had gone into their torpor. Somewhere deep under the rolling black hills, a thread of eternal green about as useful now as a fishhook in the desert. And Marcus found he didn’t particularly care. The path before them was clear enough: don’t walk so far north that you were going uphill, don’t walk so far south that your feet got wet. Soon enough, they’d reach the inner plains, and then Suddapal and then south across the Inner Sea to Lyoneia. And after that, it was too far ahead to figure.
The grass on the hills they rode was so green it hurt to look at. So intense that there were times Marcus felt that he was dreaming or hallucinating, and the sun and the tall blue air left him feeling that he could stretch up his arms and take it all into himself. Small villages studded the coastline. Timzinae fishermen, their black, insectlike chitin greyed and cracked by years of brine. When they were asked, Master Kit told a story about being a naturalist for the queen of Birancour searching for a rare kind of singing shrimp. He told it well enough that Marcus had found himself wondering sometimes whether the next cove might have them. Or perhaps it was the power of Master Kit’s strange blood that made him so convincing.
They were asked less often than Marcus had expected, though. The more usual case was that they were offered a bowl of the potluck stew that every fishing dock kept cooking all through the year, each man paying in something from that day’s catch in return for a bowl that had been simmering since before some of them had been born. The fishermen of the coast were dour and gruff and friendly. The women, apart from being Timzinae, were beautiful. The scales were more than enough to keep Marcus from repeating his error from Porte Oliva, though. And Master Kit, while a vicious flirt, never seemed to follow along as far as a woman’s bed.
Suddapal was a complex of five coastal cities, the largest of which spread out black and tan against the unreal green of the countryside. Where there should have been farms, sheep, goats, there was a vast swath of wild grassland, untouched and unhunted except at religious festivals. It struck Marcus as a terrible way to assure a steady food supply, but he had to admit it was beautiful to look at and walk through. A dragon’s road led east from its main square, but they’d gone as far east as they were going to go.
Which meant finding a boat.
“Are you sailors, then?” the Yemmu man asked.
“I’ve been known to haul a rope a time or two,” Marcus said.
“I’ve been known to pray a time or two,” the man said, the words surprisingly clear around the massive bulk of his tusks. “Doesn’t make me a priest.”