“Unless she wants to go haul it to the street herself, the reason doesn’t much matter.”
Yardem chuckled.
“What?” Marcus said.
“That was the argument I offered her too. She didn’t seem to find the prospect interesting.”
“That, old friend,” Marcus said, “is a powerfully unpleasant woman.”
“Is.”
“Still. She’s not the worst I’ve worked for.”
“Quite a bit of room in that, sir.”
“Fair point.”
The pigeon or one like it landed on the edge of the building, considering the pair with one wet, black eye and then the other.
“Well, Yardem. The day you throw me in a ditch and take over the company?”
“Sir?”
“It’s not today.”
“Good to know, sir.”
“Do you think Merian would have made a good banker?”
“Hard to say, sir. I imagine she would have if she’d decided to be.”
“I think I’m going to get some rest. Face the Pyk in the morning.”
“Yes, sir. Also?” Yardem cleared his throat, a deep and distant rumble. “If I went too far…”
“Going too far’s your job. When it’s called for, you should always go too far. Everyone else respects me too much,” Marcus said. “Well, except for Kit.”
“I’ll remember that, sir.”
Yardem rose and padded away. The moon hid behind dark clouds. The stars came out, first one, and then a handful, and then a host so large as to beggar the imagination. Marcus watched them until his mind began to slide sideways of its own accord, and he pulled his blanket around him. The smell of roasting pork flirted and vanished, borne on the fickle breeze.
When the nightmare came, as he had known it would, it was almost the same as always. The flames, the screaming, the feeling of the small body, dead in his arms. Only this time, there were three figures in the fire. He woke before he could tell if Cithrin was the third or if he was.
Cithrin
I
n facing her first sea voyage, Cithrin had expected many of the hardships that came with being in a ship: the nausea and the close quarters and the fear of knowing that her life depended on the ship remaining afloat without any particular control over whether it did. All had proven real, though few as unpleasant as she had anticipated they would be. The surprise was how much the enforced inactivity calmed her. At any time of day or night, she would take herself to the deck, lean against the rail, and consider the waves or the distant dark line of the coast as it slipped past. There was nothing she could do, and so there was nothing required of her. If she willed the ship on faster toward Carse or grew homesick for her little rooms above the counting house, it made no difference, and before long she found herself simply inhabiting the moment. She was one of the first to see the Drowned.
At first, it was no more than a slightly lighter tone to the blue. Then it was something under the water—a barkstripped log or some pale-fleshed fish. Then it was the body of a Firstblood man, naked, staring emptily up toward the air. A sailor called, laughter in the sound, and footsteps pattered behind her as the crew came to the rail with her. The Drowned man wasn’t alone. Cithrin saw a woman floating at his side, and then another beyond her. And then hundreds more. Between one moment and the next, the sea was full of them. The slow movements of their limbs could almost have been the water pushing them. As Cithrin watched, one rose up from the depths just under her—a young man almost a boy with the thin, coltish frame of an adolescent or a Cinnae. His dark eyes seemed to find her, and slowly, he smiled.
“Never seen the Drowned before, Magistra?” Barth asked. She hadn’t noticed him there.
“Once,” she said. “There was one in one of the canals in Vanai. But never like this.”
“Usually travel in pods a little smaller’n this. We got lucky, seeing so many at once.”
A sailor shouted and leaped, diving out into the water. With his splash, the Drowned sank at once, falling away beneath the water as fast as stones. Cithrin watched the boy beneath her vanish. In the water, the sailor laughed and tried to dive after them.
“What an ass,” Barth said with no particular heat in his voice.
“Why do they run?”
“They’re slow, they’re weak out of water, and they’re naked. Sailors and shoremen sometimes have cruel ideas of sport,” Barth said. “The Drowned are like anyone else. They see a threat, and they avoid it. Even fish do that.”
Cithrin nodded, but she also watched the sailor when his shipmates pulled him up grinning from the water, and she made a point of avoiding him for the rest of the voyage.