“They told me you were gone,” he said. “They said the Lord Regent’s men took you.”
“They did,” Clara said and let herself fall into the embrace. Just a little. “You can put me down now if you like.”
“Never, my lady.”
“Very romantic,” she said. “Put me down.”
She sat by the oven, and Abatha gave her a bowl for free, so she bought a pipeful of tobacco instead. She told about her meetings with Ogene and Jorey and Sabiha, and then coming home only to be stopped by Geder’s men and carried away with a cowl over her face. She finished the last of her stew as she got to the strange dark room with the soldiers and Geder Palliako towering before her, demanding that she answer questions. She felt herself growing calmer with the retelling, as if she were seeing for the first time what had happened. The distance was reassuring.
She lit her pipe from the stove. Abatha’s stew might be salty and bland, but she did manage to find genuinely decent tobacco. Clara sat at the stove, puffing thoughtfully for a long moment before she realized Vincen and Abatha were waiting for her to go on.
“And then they let me go,” she said, rather gamely.
“But what did they ask?” Abatha said. Her face looked really animated for the first time since Clara had met her.
“Oh, that. They asked if I’d been conspiring against Geder Palliako and the crown.”
“What did you say?”
“That the thought hadn’t occurred to me,” she said.
“And?” Vincen said.
Clara raised an eyebrow.
“And now it has.”
Entr’acte
Master Kit
S
uddupal was at first a community of cities, their buildings and structures tall and solid, and then it was a dark and monstrous hand reaching out toward them with piers for fingers, and then it was gone, and they were alone on the wide sea. Adasa Orsun could sail the little ship by herself, moving from one line to another, lifting up the sails and shifting the angle of the rudder until everything was exactly as she wished it to be. Every now and then, she would tell Marcus to help her with some task where three hands were better than two. She never asked Kit, and honestly Kit didn’t mind.
It had been a very long time since he’d set out in a small craft over large water. He had almost forgotten the way the horizon-wide water and the open arch of sky conspired with the smallness of the boat and left him feeling overwhelmed and constrained at the same time. So much space all around him in all directions, and yet two paces this way, three in another, and a belowdecks so cramped that he couldn’t stand upright.
His life had become that as well. After his flight from the temple and the goddess and the only life he’d known, the world had unfolded before him, every new discovery egging him on to the one after. He’d learned that many of the things he’d been taught in the temple were true: the dragons were gone from the world and their slave races had made it their own, people of all races deceived each other almost constantly, wherever there were people gathered together in large groups there would be violence and death and theft. But he’d also found just as many that were wrong: that truth guaranteed justice, that the thirteen races were doomed to hate each other, that people like Adasa Orsun—Timzinae—were a separate and lesser kind of humanity. Finding his way through the mixture of myths and lies had become not only a life’s work but a joyful one.
He’d traveled widely and with men and women whose company he enjoyed. He’d listened to practical philosophers about the nature of the world. He had taken lovers and lost them. And in that wide, open sea of options and choice, his way had come down to this tiny boat on its way to a series of events both difficult and inevitable. In the face of the ocean, the tiny boat. In the face of freedom, only this: to save the world he’d discovered and come to love, or else die in the attempt.
It sounded heroic and romantic. The truth was sometimes something less.
“I ate a cockroach once,” Marcus Wester said. He was sprawled on the deck, shirtless, an arm flung across his eyes.
“You didn’t,” Kit said.
“I ate a mouse once.”
“You didn’t.”
There was a pause, and the world was only the soft wind and the lapping waves against the side of the boat.
“I ate a worm once.”
“Why did you do that?” Kit asked.
Marcus grinned.
“Lost a bet,” he said.
Adasa Orsun rose up from belowdecks, stretched her arms over her head, and yawned a wide, deep yawn.
“We’ve made good time,” she said, and she believed it. So probably they were.
“How can you tell?” Marcus asked. “It’s not like there’s a road you can follow or landmarks to see.”