each other. It’s a funeral where no one laughs and no one cries, and it leaves us emptier than the loss alone would have. And so, today, instead of a religious service, I was hoping we might have a funeral for the cities that we have lost. Nus and Inentai and Suddapal. And Vanai.”
To her surprise, Cithrin felt tears in her eyes. She kept her chin high. She might weep, but she wasn’t going to snivel. Yardem spoke for a few moments more about Suddapal and when he had come to the city as a younger man. How it had changed in the years since, and how he had, and how the differences in them both had given him a sense of kinship with it. Then he asked Magistra Isadau to stand, and she spoke about the innate conflict of being a woman of business with her first loyalties to power and profit, and at the same time a citizen of the five cities. And her favorite places within them. Then Jurin spoke about showing his son the cavern at the center of the commons for the first time, and walking with his grandmother to the marketplace the last time she went. He talked of the fear he felt for the children taken by Antea. And soon, Cithrin was making no pretense of dignity, nor was anyone else. One by one, the people stood and spoke or else only sobbed, and Cithrin wept with them.
She didn’t see Yardem come to her side. His hand was simply on hers, and then without knowing how it had happened, he was leading her up to the altar. The faces looked up at her, waiting for her to speak. I can’t do this, she thought, and from the back of her mind a small voice replied, Yes, I can.
“Suddapal wasn’t my city,” she said. “That was Vanai. The Antean army took it … took it from me. And they took the people who raised me and loved me, if anybody did. There was a place by the canal by the bank house where there was a little boy who sold coffee with his father, and they … they took them too. They took everything there and they burned it.”
A sorrow she hadn’t known was there opened in her, vast as oceans, and she hung her head for a moment and Yardem stepped toward her. She put out a hand to stop him, gritted her teeth, and raised her head.
“I haven’t cried. I haven’t mourned. I haven’t let myself be angry for that loss. I never felt it because feeling it would have broken me. And now, with all of you here as witness, I am broken. I am broken, but I’m not dead. And I am not finished.”
The hand that touched her shoulder wasn’t Yardem’s. Magistra Isadau turned Cithrin to her, wrapped her arms around Cithrin’s shaking body, and pulled her close. Cithrin wept, and more than wept. She howled like a baby who’d lost her mother and her father, which she also was. She screamed into the older woman’s flesh, and she did it with half a hundred men and women watching her do it, and she felt no shame.
“Good girl,” Isadau murmured. “Oh, good, good girl. You’ll be fine. Your heart isn’t going to die. You’re fine.”
Cithrin held the Timzinae woman close and would not let her go.
It’s going to fall apart,” Yardem said. “All respect, the network was dangerous when it was only standing up against soldiers, bureaucrats, and cunning men. These tainted priests make it impossible.”
“I know,” Isadau said. “Two of the people who agreed to work with me have already missed meetings. I was able to get word out that if the priest questions you, not to answer any questions. They aren’t lying if they don’t speak.”
Yardem grunted like he had taken a blow. Isadau raised her eyebrows.
“Not speaking can be made difficult,” he said.
The courtyard had turned from lush green to leathery brown as if overnight. Autumn had come to Suddapal, and the crispness of the air said that winter would come quickly behind it. Isadau sat on a wooden stool, her body rigid and tense. Yardem stood at ease, a soldier again instead of a priest. Cithrin’s pacing contrasted with their stillness, but she couldn’t help it. Movement made her thoughts feel clearer and the knot in her belly less likely to lead to vomiting again. Fallen leaves crackled under her feet and skittered away from her