Camnipol rose on the southern horizon, still three days away. Coming from the north, it looked like a shallow hill, spiked and gnarled with bare trees and brush. Smoke rose from it like the fires of a massive army. She knew that the city was reputed to be beautiful, and perhaps as she grew closer it would become so. From here, it was not.
“You notice the way the group splits?” Paerin Clark asked her, breaking her chain of thought.
They were sitting near the cookfire. It was too warm to need the flames for warmth, but the cheerfulness of the light and the routines of long habit brought them there. She followed his gaze to another fire on the far side of the road. A bright silk tent glowed from within. Of the two dozen men and women put together by King Tracian and Komme Medean to take the pulses of Imperial Antea, only five were noblemen, and they kept to themselves. Canl Daskellin, who had broken bread with his fingers at Komme Medean’s table, was among them.
“Highborn on one side, merchant class on the other,” Cithrin said.
“It always goes like that,” the man said. He handed her a bowl. Black beans shining bright as insects and covered with a grey sauce that looked terrible and tasted like the finest cook in Birancour had made it fresh. “Do you ever wonder why that is?”
“No, I don’t,” Cithrin said. “It’s because we all know that the idea of noble blood is a sham.”
Across the fire from them, one of the other merchants chuckled. Cithrin felt a blush rising in her cheeks, but Paerin took a mouthful of his own meal and nodded her on.
“You only have to enforce boundaries where they’re being imposed,” she said. “Think about the races. It’s been hundreds, maybe thousands of generations since the dragons made the last of us. In all that time, you would think all of the thirteen races would have blended into one, but they haven’t. We’re all more or less what we would have been if the Dragon Emperor were still in the sky. There are real barriers between Jasuru and Yemmu and Cinnae. They don’t need to be enforced. They just are.”
“To clarify, though. You’re between races.”
“And has that made Cinnae and Firstblood one thing? No. But nobility? People have become knights and earls and counts through force of arms or by buying their way in. And even the highest families have a few unwelcome members living among the poor and despised. The dirty secret of nobility is that it’s another way of saying power. We may tell other stories, but when we do, it’s because we’re building fences where there aren’t any.”
“And why would that make them sit there and us here?” Paerin said.
“Because otherwise we couldn’t tell who had the greater value. Say I have ten coins that all look the same, only some will buy five bolts of cloth, but the others are worth just one. Can you picture that?”
“But all the coins look the same,” Paerin said.
The other conversations around the fire had stopped. They were listening to her. She reached for the skin of watered wine and drank a mouthful before she went on.
“Yes. So it’s in your interest not to confuse them, isn’t it? You put one set in a tent over there, and the rest by a fire over here. Because if you put them all in the same purse, you wouldn’t know if you’d drawn a coin worth five bolts or only one. We are those coins. You and I and Komme and everyone here. We’re worth one. They over there are worth five. But if you mixed us all together, you wouldn’t see a difference. That’s why everyone hates bankers so much.”
“I think we respect noble blood,” Paerin said.
“We don’t because we lend at interest. A wise loan can make a poor man rich. A unwise one can unmake the powerful. We’re the ones who can move the coins from one side to the other, and we take our living from doing it. We’re agents of change, and the people with the most to lose are right to fear us.”
Paerin Clark looked across the fire at the man sitting there. The other man nodded, and Cithrin felt a pang of self-consciousness.
“You, Magistra, have a fascinating way of seeing things,” Paerin said, leaning back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No. Be proud of it. It’s why Komme sent you.”
T
he walls of Camnipol were so thick that the tunnel from one side to the other needed lanterns in the middle. The streets within were packed as tightly with bodies and carts as the narrowest alleys of Porte Oliva. Cithrin stayed close to Paerin Clark and kept one hand on her purse. She hadn’t come all this way to let a roadside pickpocket embarrass her now. The knot in her gut had been for the most part absent during her travels. It came back now as hard as a cramp. It was like stepping into the city had stripped all her certainty from her. As if the city itself disliked her and they both knew it.