in his body that came from having been awake since first light. Kalliam’s insurrection had been terrible, violent, and uncertain. For weeks, Camnipol had been a battleground, and the scars were still there. Burned-out compounds that hadn’t yet been rebuilt or razed. Street barricades pulled aside or into alleys, but not dismantled. And it wasn’t only the city. Geder felt it in himself too, as much as he tried to deny it or find some joy. Dawson’s betrayal had changed him too.
But in those days and nights squatting in the darkness, hoarding the candles and eating whatever the actors had snuck to them, there had been a kind of distance from the world, a sense of time standing still. He’d spent more time talking to Aster in those few weeks than he had in the whole year since. No council meetings, no servants plucking at him, no duties or expectations or demands. It might have been terrible at the time, but looking back, it seemed benign. A kind of golden moment, barely recognized when it happened.
“It is disappointing, isn’t it?” he said. Aster sighed and looked up at the massive expanse of the Kingspire looming above them.
“I miss Cithrin.”
“I know,” Geder said, swinging his sword through the empty air just the way Aster had been doing not minutes before. “I do too.”
Cithrin
The stream of refugees from Inentai began with a handful that arrived after the fall of Nus. At first they were the sort of people who moved easily through the world—people without work or with the sorts of trade that called for travel, with family in Suddapal to support them or without family anywhere. They came to Suddapal to find new places for themselves, and some petitioned the Medean bank for the coin that would help them begin again. Cithrin sat with Magistra Isadau and listened to the requests, discussed which to accept and which to reject. The woman who needed a loan to join the tanner’s guild had years of experience in Inentai and would be nearly certain to find the work to repay them. The three young men looking to buy a boat had lived all their lives in a landlocked city, and by giving them the money the bank would also be providing them the means to flee the debt should it go bad. Cithrin learned the etiquette of the market houses: when she could step into another conversation and when it would be rude, how to bid up a competitor’s contract to lower their profit and how to build temporary partnerships with them to increase them again. The deep structure of the city slowly became clear to her, like a musician learning a song composed in a foreign style.
But the stream did not stop. More people in larger groups, and of a different nature. As the summer ran its course, whole families came together, carts laden with the possessions of lifetimes. Almost weekly, Magistra Isadau offered the hospitality of the compound to groups too large to find shelter in smaller households. The stories weren’t unexpected. The war in Sarakal was too dangerous, and they had a child or a mother or a cousin in health too fragile to withstand a siege. Often the men of fighting age stayed behind to defend city and country, but not always. Magistra Isadau and her siblings fed their guests and welcomed them to their table. And as if following their example, the fivefold city of Suddapal opened wide its arms and gathered the fugitives of Sarakal into its vast bosom. Even as she watched it, Cithrin understood that the generosity was a symptom of something rotten.
History was clear: refugees of war were seldom if ever welcomed in the cities to which they fled unless they brought with them something of value. And yet all, or nearly all, of the citizens of Inentai were welcomed. And so they all, even the poorest, had something of value. The explanation was simple: by their presence, they carried the story that Suddapal was safe. That image of the city was powerfully reassuring, almost intoxicating, to its citizens, because they knew it wasn’t true.
It was a matter of time before the grand and glorious fabrication collapsed. It would begin with one or two pessimists and dissenters, then a handful more, and then everyone. And when it came, it would come as letters of credit. The carefully coded instruments could be purchased with anything—coin, cloth, spice, steel—and presented at any of the Medean bank’s branches