“Master Kit?” Cary said. “Are you crying?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Men weep. We find crying undignified.”
She put her arm around his shoulder. Like a sailor sipping his last freshwater before a voyage, he tried to drink in the feeling of her beside him—the bend of her elbow at the back of his neck, the solid weight of her muscles, the smell of verbena and soap. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded his assent. It took a long moment before he could speak.
“I believe we will need to find another player,” he said. “Older man with a certain gravity. Someone who can take the paternal roles and the villains. Lord Fox. Orcus the Demon King. Those.”
“Your roles,” Cary said.
“Mine.”
Raindrops as small as pinpricks tapped the thatching above them, the bricks before. The practiced blows of false swords and the grunts of the boys swinging them. Hornet had been with the company longer than Cary. Smit played more roles. But Cary would guide them. She would hold the little family of the road together after he was gone, if anyone would.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“There’s something I feel I have to do,” he said.
“We’d help.”
“I believe you would try. But …”
“But?”
He shifted to look her in the eyes. Her arm slid away from him. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and large enough to make her seem younger than she was. He could see her now as she had been that first night, seven years before in the free city of Maccia, dancing in the public square for coin. She’d hardly been a girl then, feral and hungry and distrustful of anything masculine. Talent and ambition had burned off her like heat from a fire. Opal had warned him that the girl would be trouble and agreed that the price would be justified. Now Cary was a woman full-grown. He wondered if this was what it would feel like to have a daughter.
“I am afraid I wouldn’t be able to do what was called for if I was also protecting all of you,” he said. “You are the family I’ve made. If I can imagine you safe and content, I think I can sacrifice whatever else is needed.”
“You’re expecting a high price, it sounds like,” she said.
“I am.”
Cary sighed, and the wry smile that haunted her lips in times of trouble came to her. Remember this, he told himself. Remember the way her lips twist and her eyebrow rises. Keep it close. Pay attention.
“Well, piss,” she said.
“For what it carries, I am truly sorry to go.”
“Do you have anybody in mind to take the roles?” she asked.
He could see the pain in her. He was betraying her, abandoning them all, and she would no more blame him for it than cut off her toes. He wished he could take her hand in his, but she’d chosen the tone for their conversation, and he didn’t have the right to overrule her. Not any longer.
“There’s a group that makes the northern circuit. Paldrin Leh and Sebast Berrin. Three years ago, they had two fighting for the same roles. Find them, and you might get someone who already knows the lines. Paldrin’s a Haaverkin, but that might add a touch of the exotic if you take him south.”
“I’ll ask around, then,” she said. “When are you leaving?”
“Tonight,” he said.
“Do you have to go alone?”
The apostate hesitated. It was a question he hadn’t decided yet. The task before him was impossible. As doomed as it was inevitable. His sacrifice was his own, which made it curiously easy. To ask someone else to walk willingly to death beside him was no favor. And yet if it made the difference between success and failure, a world redeemed or lost …
“Perhaps not,” he said. “There is one other who might help. But not from the troupe.”
“And I suppose it would be entirely too much to ask what this mysterious errand is that’s calling you away?” she asked. And then, contradicting herself, “You owe us that much.”
The apostate licked his lips, searching for words he hadn’t used, even to himself. When he found them, he chuckled.
“This may sound a bit grandiose,” he said, scratching at his beard with one long finger.
“Try me.”
“I’m off to kill a goddess.”
Cithrin bel Sarcour, Voice and Agent of the Medean Bank in Porte Oliva
C
ithrin bel Sarcour, voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, stepped out of the bank’s office with her head high, her features composed, and rage burning in her breast. Around her, Porte Oliva was entering its springtime. The bright cloth banners and glittering paste jewels of the First Thaw celebrations still lay in the streets and alleyways, slowly decaying into grime. Snow haunted the shadows where the midday sun couldn’t reach. Cithrin’s breath plumed before her as if her heart were a furnace belching pale smoke, and she felt the bite of the air as a distant thing.