women at court were forced into the black leather cloaks. They did it, all of them, because it was easier for them not to weigh their loyalty against their conscience. Palliako might be the occasion of it, but she herself was evidence that the choice belonged to each of them. She wondered how many other loyal traitors there might be out there, thinking private thoughts much like her own. She wondered how she might find them without too terrible a risk. She noticed that she wasn’t thinking about Dawson.
Clara gathered herself together, put a pleasant smile on her lips, and turned away from the bridge. It was the nearest thing she had to a tomb for her husband, and it left her heart feeling empty to know she wouldn’t feel the need to come back to it.
Vincen smiled and nodded when she stepped back onto the solid ground of the street. Apart from a paleness to his skin that the days hadn’t quite erased, the only sign he had been near death was a scar of living silver where the cunning man had called on angels or spirits or dragon’s art to fuse flesh that wouldn’t have mended. She had seen it when she sat by his side, nursing him back to strength. With his shirt on, it wasn’t visible. She took his arm and wrapped it around her own. It felt different than it had the times before. Likely it was only that he held himself more carefully, but she liked to imagine it was also that she had changed as well.
“Are you well, my lady?” he asked. The formality in his voice told her that he knew the answer, and that it was no.
“I have been thinking, Vincen,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Writing letters has been very useful in gathering my thoughts,” she said, “but I feel the time has come for something more.”
Cithrin
The trick to moving the wealth of the bank was not being seen to do so. If word went around that the Medean bank was leaving Suddapal, it would cause any number of problems. The people still under contract with the bank would stop paying their loans, because why give money to someone who wouldn’t be present to take the complaint to the magistrate? The scent of coin and cloth would call pirates and bandits, making it less likely that the goods would survive the trek to Porte Oliva. Tax assessors and agents of the city’s governor, seeing the wealth trickling away, would want to eke out as much as they could quickly, before the chance disappeared. Or the high council might send guards to take command of the gold and use it to hire mercenaries, if any mercenaries would accept the work.
So Cithrin and Isadau carved the wealth of the bank into smaller pieces. A private crate sent in a caravan through the Free Cities that purported to hold bolts of cotton actually contained silks. A message box sealed with lead and wax sent by courier carried gems and jewelry. An earthenware statue sent as a gift to Pyk Usterhall, notary of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, was hollow and filled with coin. Technically, it was smuggling, since they only paid the tax on what the goods appeared to be and not what they were. Cithrin’s conscience didn’t bother her on the point. If the governors of the five cities couldn’t assure the safety of her bank, they had already broken their end of the contract. Besides which, every other business and family with ties outside Elassae was doing the same.
Roach—Halvill, dammit—and Maha married in the private chapel at the compound amid great revelry. The priest was the same she had seen on her very first Tenthday, and he used his skills as a cunning man to make his voice sound grand and resonant. She caught Yardem rolling his eyes and shared his amusement. But when the guard and the pregnant girl sipped from the wide silver wedding cup and swore to make the journey of this life in company, Cithrin found herself inexplicably weeping.
They were slated to leave the next day on a ship bound for Cabral with enough of the bank’s capital that, if they stole it and ran, they’d be able to set up a very pleasant life together in Far Syramys. But they wouldn’t. Halvill would put it on a cart and trek back to Porte Oliva, just the way he’d promised. Halvill and Maha had forged a new family, it was