her neck up a little to reach his lips, and she kept the pressure constant, pinning him in place like a flower pressed in a book. Her mouth opened his, and she bruised him. For a moment, he was too shocked, and then he wasn’t. When she stepped back, he staggered.
Her breath was fast, her heart racing. The warmth in her body was strange and wild and familiar as an old coat, long forgotten and rediscovered. When she laughed, it came from low in her throat. It came from the girl she had been at eighteen.
“My lady,” Vincen said unsteadily.
“Clara, Vincen,” she said. “My name is Clara. Now take me home with you.”
Marcus
The first days of an occupation said a lot about the war that brought it about. In the best case, the new protector would reach out to the older, established powers in the city and find ways to make the habits and expectations of the citizens work gracefully under the new regime. The worst was slaughtering everyone and burning the place to the foundations. Suddapal fell in between. There were few fires, and what there were got doused quickly. Three ships sank during the sack, and given the number of vessels at the docks, Marcus suspected they’d been scuttled by captains who for whatever reason couldn’t put out to sea. The physical city itself was treated, for the greatest part, with respect. But it was the respect of an owner for their property. It didn’t bode well for the citizens.
And neither did the march of children.
Suddapal had three gaols, a legacy of the different cities it had been before they grew together. One stood safely inland with great stone walls around lines of iron cages. The second was at the top of a cliff near the shore with cells that lay open to the weather, foul or fair. The third was an island with only a single bay and currents cruel enough to defeat even the most experienced swimmers. All three had been emptied of their prisoners and refilled with the young. From his first glance at the children packed twenty in a cage meant for six, Marcus understood what he was seeing. Not a city folded into the empire. Not a people made subjects. Slaves, then, at best. And more likely, the culling that Kit had feared. The man did pick the worst times to be right.
The new protector—an improbably mustached Firstblood named Fallon Broot—had set a curfew for all Timzinae in the city. No one on the streets from dusk to dawn. Marcus had seen a fisherman at the piers shouting that the catch would be gone before he was on the water. The new Antean portmaster had him whipped in the street until there were bright tracks of raw meat along the chitined back. A dozen soldiers watched, laughing.
All of it put Marcus in an odd place. Like the Anteans, he was Firstblood. Like them, he was an unfamiliar face in the city. He could walk the darkened streets that the citizens no longer could. And more than that, he could pass unremarked by the new masters of Suddapal because he looked like them. Even Enen and Yardem, not technically bound by the curfew, would be noticed for their race. Marcus looked like what he was, a Firstblood soldier out of uniform and a little long in the tooth. He looked like nobody. He could ferry messages between the elements of Magistra Isadau’s shadow company with less danger than anyone else in the branch.
Or at least less danger from the invaders.
“Isadau sent me,” Marcus said, his hands at his shoulders, palms out. The blade pressed against his throat.
“The hell she did,” the Timzinae man holding it said.
“My name is Marcus Wester. I’m guard captain for the Porte Oliva branch.” It might not be true, but going into the complexities of his employment seemed like a poor decision. “I came here with Magistra bel Sarcour.”
“Prove it.”
“You have seven children hidden in the attic right now. You sent the message this afternoon as a letter asking about a loan for a new millstone.”
The blade came tighter, drawing a trickle of blood. The compound around him was less than a fifth of the bank’s size. Hardly bigger than a Northcoast farmhouse. They were in the dining room, the remnants of the night’s meal still on wooden plates. In addition to the man presently in position to open his throat, there were four by the benches with knives. This,