Kit finished his gruesome task and tried standing. It looked awkward and painful. Marcus felt himself making the calculations. If Kit’s wound went septic, getting back to friendly territory would be a hard thing. Kit could likely talk any Southlings they came across into giving them aid, providing the man was still coherent and not lost in a fever. If it was all up to Marcus, their chances would be worse.
And even then, there was only so much longer they could go on before the landscape consumed them. They would become another cautionary tale to excite the interest of explorers and idiots. Any man who cared about his own life would turn north now and hope he hit seawater before his strength gave out. Only that wasn’t the job.
“We can make camp here,” Marcus said.
“And spend all night fighting ants and scavengers?”
“We can make camp a way down from here. Maybe find a little creek.”
“I think that sounds wise,” Kit said. “Let me get my staff.”
While Kit limped into the underbrush to retrieve the fallen stick, Marcus knelt by the dead animal. It was magnificent in its way.
“Your time now, kitty,” he said under his breath. “My time later.”
He patted the beast’s shoulder like it was an opponent he’d bested in the gymnasium’s fighting pit, then started to stand. He stopped. The ground near the great black claws had been churned up, black earth and pale roots. Marcus dug his fingers down, pulling up the fabric of plant and soil. The stone beneath it was a perfect green. Only it wasn’t stone.
“Kit?”
“Marcus?”
“There’s dragon’s jade here.”
Kit hobbled forward, leaning against his staff. His face was grimy and streaked with his own blood, but his eyes were bright.
“Where?”
Marcus stood up and stepped back, pointing to the turned earth. As Kit knelt down to examine it, Marcus walked up and down the clearing, squinting in concentration. All around them, great trees towered up, fighting each other to reach the sunlight. But here in this strip, the trees were thinner, shorter, weaker. The roots that fed them, perhaps shallower. Yes, now that he knew to look for it, it was clear.
“This is a road,” he said. “There’s a dragon’s road running through this valley. North to south, and maybe turning a little to the east just here.”
“Well, now,” Kit said. “There’s a pleasant surprise.”
“Did we expect to find a dragon’s road?”
“We did not.”
“And if there’s dragon’s road, it seems likely that at some point way back when there were still dragons to make the jade, it was a road to someplace.”
“That would seem to follow.”
Marcus felt a smile plucking at his lips.
“This is the path to your mysterious reliquary, isn’t it?”
Kit hauled himself up.
“I suppose it could be.”
For a long moment, the two men stood in the cloud of flies that buzzed around the corpse, grinning at each other like boys.
Cithrin
Magistra Isadau’s office was near the center of the compound. It was as understated as Cithrin’s back room in the café had been, but like a stone set in tin or else silver, the surroundings changed the nature of the space. Where Cithrin’s workplace was clearly built on business, Isadau drew anyone coming on bank business through her house. After meeting with Cithrin in Porte Oliva, a person would step out to see the Grand Market with its queensmen and merchants, traders and cutpurses, shouts and laughter and commerce. Leaving Isadau’s meant passing through not only the magistra’s home, but her brother’s, her sister’s, her mother’s. Isadau’s nieces and nephews wandered the wide hallways with their friends or else their tutors. Mother Kicha had visitors every day, so that even in the afternoons, the broad hall outside the matriarch’s bedchamber might be half full of poets or priests or sour-faced Timzinae women embroidering flowers and sunbursts onto dresses and pointedly ignoring Cithrin.
Jurin—the brother—was a farrier, and the stables were his as much as Isadau’s. Kani, who had met Cithrin at the docks, did scribe work for the bank and deliveries for Jurin and errands for her mother without drawing any distinction between them. Yardem and Enen and Roach were expected to work with Isadau’s own guardsmen, sharing the duties of the watch and escorting payments through the city, and they were also guests welcome at the family dinner table. The kitchens smelled of fennel and cumin and cinnamon, and they fed anyone who came. The cook who oversaw them, an old Yemmu man with a black crack running jaggedly through his left tusk, made a great noise and wailing about being interrupted and then kept whoever had come in conversation harder to escape than a honey trap.