Marcus put the letter back on the table. It lay limp and broke-winged.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just means I’ll be watching the store a little longer before she gets back.”
Pyk smacked her lips.
“And if she doesn’t come back?”
Marcus leaned against the wall, his arms crossed. He took a deep breath, and felt hollow. “Why wouldn’t she come back?”
“Because she’s young and finding her place in the world. It may not be here. Maybe she gets out there and finds there’s something she’d rather do than be my mask.”
“Tell me that this wasn’t your plan,” Marcus said. “Tell me you weren’t trying to get her to go out there so that she’d find something else to do. Leave you with the bank.”
“I don’t make her decisions. And I don’t know that she’ll stay away. Only I can see that she might.”
“All right,” Marcus said. “That could happen.” “If it does, do you still work here?”
Marcus smiled. The hollowness had a touch of anger now. He didn’t want Cithrin to leave the bank and Porte Oliva, and he didn’t like thinking what it meant that he didn’t.
“Why do I get the feeling there’s a particular answer you’re looking for?”
“There is,” Pyk said. “I want you to say you will. Having Marcus Wester collecting the debts gives the bank a certain weight. And you’re good at it. But if you’re only here for the girl, then you’re only here for the girl.”
“Well, I’m here until the girl comes back,” he said. “If she doesn’t, we can talk about it then.”
Pyk’s wide, yellowed eyes took him in and she sucked at her teeth.
“That’s good enough,” she said. “And you can hire back the men I had you take down and put the other back at full rates.”
“Now that she’s gone, you mean?” Marcus said, pushing himself off the wall. “Cithrin’s here, you’ll make it hard and mean and small, but when everyone knows it’s your hand on the purse, it’s all open? That how this is?”
Pyk’s smile was so wide, he saw the holes where her tusks had been gaping dark in her gums. Her laughter wasn’t a sound but a motion in her shoulders and her belly. She shook her head.
“The girl’s letter didn’t come alone,” she said. “The holding company saw the reports. It approved my request to budget more for the guards. So now I put in more money for guards. It’s not a mystery. I’m not the villain here. You can stop treating me like one.”
Marcus stood, anger and confusion and embarrassment growing in him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t know you had to have your budget approved.”
“Don’t, strictly speaking,” Pyk said. “But the Porte Oliva branch has a reputation as unpredictable. I’m tacking into that wind. Can’t think where it came from.”
“Anything else?” Marcus said.
“Is. Keep an ear to the ground for anything about a captain name of Uus rol Osterhaal. He’ll have been coming up from Lyoneia, but he might not be announcing the fact.”
“Anything I’m trying to find out?”
“Whatever you can. Bring me what you find, and I’ll know whether it’s useful or not. You can go now. I’m going to sit here and sweat a while more.”
Marcus walked back out. He felt like he’d been in the gymnasium, down in the fighting pits getting a fist sunk just under his ribs. The world was unchanged, but it was also different. Porte Oliva seemed smaller. Thin. As if the only thing that had given the city any sense of reality was that Cithrin lived here. And if this wasn’t her city, then it was an encrustation of buildings stuck on a rock overlooking the sea. Wasn’t much charm in that.
He walked slowly, retracing his steps. The rain was still falling, though if anything less now than it had been. The streets were wet and slick, and they stank. In an hour, maybe two, the heat would loosen its grasp a little. He’d still be sweating through his shirts until morning. It would be like that until the days got short again. But he would be here when it happened. He’d be working for Pyk Usterhall and the Medean bank and waiting for Cithrin to come home until it was clear that she wouldn’t.
He held the thought in his mind like pressing his tongue to a sore tooth.
“She’s not my daughter,” he said to himself. A small voice in the far, dark reaches of his mind answered, She’s Cithrin.
He wasn’t sure what he’d thought. What he’d expected. That they would stay there, he supposed. That he and Yardem would keep her and her bank safe, if not forever, then for years at the least. It wasn’t something Cithrin had promised him or that he’d asked from her. If she found a better path, a better plan, taking it wasn’t any betrayal of him.