Except that some nights, sleep would not come. On those, she would rise, dress in her dark wools, and walk the halls of the compound. There were always a few men and women still awake or else woken early for the next day. The capacity of the Timzinae to go without sleep was remarkable to her. On one such night, she found Yardem sitting at the watch fire alone, staring at the stars scattered above them and listening to the first crickets of spring.
She looked up, tracing the new constellations she knew. Stars were not her passion.
“Evening, ma’am,” he said. “You’re up late.”
“I suppose,” she said, her words careful and deliberately unslurred. “You are too.”
“Am,” Yardem said and flicked one jingling ear. It might have been only her imagination, but the Tralgu’s wide, canine face seemed wistful. “Seems we’re settling in well.”
“Yes,” Cithrin said. “Magistra Isadau is a very intelligent woman. From everything I saw at the market house, I’d have thought the bank would be barely turning a profit, but she manages to do quite well.”
“I was thinking more of the household,” Yardem said.
“They’re very kind,” Cithrin said. “I’ve never been around a real family before. To see the way they treat each other … the way they treat us, for that. They’re all so open and loving and accepting. It’s like we’ve always belonged here and just never knew it.”
In the trees at the compound’s edge, an owl launched itself up against the stars, a shadow moving on darkness. Yardem traced its arc with eyes and ears, and Cithrin followed it by following him. The silence between them was calm, companionable. Cithrin put her small hand over the back of his.
“I hate it here,” she said. “I have never hated anyplace as much as here.”
“I know.”
“It is obvious? I try not to let it show.”
“I’ve known you a while,” Yardem said.
“They’re all so kind, and all I can feel is how little I belong with them. Magistra Isadau? She’s like a good witch from a children’s story. She’s sweet and she’s wise and she wants the best from me, and it makes my skin crawl. I keep thinking that I wouldn’t know it if she hated me. God knows she’d treat me just as well.”
A falling star streaked overhead, there and then gone.
“I knew a man once,” Yardem said. “Good fighter, pleasant to keep watch with. The sort of man who’d have done well in a company. Might have gotten as far as running one if he’d kept at it. Only he’d spent his whole youth as a slave. He’d do well enough when we were on campaign, but when we were done and he had time and money of his own and no one telling him what to do? He didn’t know how to act.”
“How did he deal with it?”
“At first, the captain tried keeping him back, giving him duties even while the other men went out and drank themselves poor. Treated the boy like he was still enslaved. That worked for a time, but in the end it wasn’t enough. It took the boy a season to manage it, but the magistrates stripped his freedom and sold him to a farmer.”
“That’s sad.”
“Is it?”
An insect landed on Cithrin, its legs struggling against the fine, pale hair of her forearm. She flicked it away.
“We say our souls want joy, but they don’t,” she said. “They want what they already know, joyful or not.”
Yardem grunted as if he’d taken a blow to the gut and pulled his hand away from her to scratch an itch she doubted was really there.
“What about you?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
“Should.”
“But you can’t.”
“Apparently not.”
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“The war, partly. The word in the trade has it that Antea is stretched tight as a drumskin. Wore themselves thin last year, and on the edge of falling apart. Except there’s other stories too.”
“You can’t say that and not tell,” Cithrin said. “I’d fire you.”
“They’re saying that the spirits of the dead march with the Antean army. And that the birds and dogs all start running away before their army comes the way they do from a fire. Makes it sound as if there’s something uncanny about the Lord Regent, like he’s some sort of cunning man.”
“Geder’s not a cunning man,” Cithrin said. “He’s … he’s just a man of too little wisdom and too much power.”