Kadra had promised to return in one night. She would ask him then.I won’t let doubt creep in.
Conversing with the vigiles that had accompanied her, she allowed Méherre to distract her with a visit to one of Komis’s markets. She Bridged them to the city’s western gates—an area barely touched by plague—and the guards waved them in.
Far above them, halfway up the Drust Mountains, the Am Semni Institute shone white over Komis. She recalled Ythras mentioning Dalvia seeing to the aid of boil beetle plague victims and struggled to reconcile it with the woman she’d seen in the farmer’s memory.
She didn’t want to be there. Still heartsick at the realizations that memory had prompted, she tucked the truth away. She couldn’t confront it now.
A mass of color bloomed ahead. At least a hundred stalls clustered in a chaotic jumble. Woven fabrics stretched over the stalls’ frames to provide marketgoers respite from the lightly falling snow. She swallowed, disconcerted by the similarities to the market Noceo had decimated. Yet, the people of Komis refused to be cowed. Snow crowned their fur hats as they puttered about with determined focus, blazeleaf rolls smoking between their fingers, like life here would go on at their will and their pace.
A smile lifted her lips. She had never felt at home in Arsamea, but there was something about the north’s pragmatic strength that called to her. Funnily enough, it was the same strength she saw in Kadra.
Pulling away from that thought, she was browsing a bladesmith’s stall with Méherre when an outraged roar came from the mouth of the marketplace.
Exchanging startled glances, they searched for the source and cursed at the Guild wagons queuing up at a tavern.Wine and Spirits Guild again.She didn’t have to make out the yelling match between the tavern’s proprietor and the Guildsmen to know the source of the conflict.
“This is even less than you brought last time!” the burly tavernkeeper roared across a suddenly silent market. “One hundred amphorae every two weeks. That was our bargain.”
“If you paid.” The Wines Guildsman driving the first wagon shrugged.
“Ihavepaid!”
“Well, price’s gone up.” The Guildsman raised both hands to forestall further argument. “I don’t decide these things. If you want the wine, you pay for it. Or you get less—what the fuck!” He flinched as red spattered across his face.
Sarai groaned as another tomato flew across the street to pulverize itself on his tunic.
“Fuck off, southern trash!” one marketgoer yelled. “Go pray to your gods some more!”
“I got some more scuta for you here!” Sarai muffled a horrified laugh when a stall-owner raised a nasty-looking cudgel.
The Guildsmen in the wagons dismounted, lips pulled back in sneers. “Fucking charity cases think you’re something? You’d all starve to death if we cut you off!”
“Do it!” yelled a fruit seller tossing an enormous grapefruit. It hit a wagon and burst. “See how you’ll do without our metals, fur, and oil! We could invade you tomorrow!”
Wading into the fruit-slinging would only get her pelted by both sides. She couldn’t ask for diplomacy when the north hadn’t had a seat at the bargaining table for decades.
“Lively,” Méherre noted.
“I hope they’ll have some fruit left after all this.” Sarai let out a long breath of relief when the Wines Guildsmen retreated behind their wagons, unloading their amphorae with bitter curses while angrily picking fruit off themselves. The crowd returned to their wares and blazeleaf rolls.
Méherre sighed. “The south thinks of us as backward, unsophisticated, crude. There’s truth to some of that but they miss the fear.” Her voice went taut with a mix of resignation and anger. “We northerners survive, you know that. There’s little else we can do.”
“You’ve an advantage,” Sarai noted. “As a Bridger, you can go anywhere.”
“If only! I have to physically journey to every location before I can Bridge to it, remember?” Méherre stared at her hands. “Are you aware that if Edessa fell tomorrow, Komis would be Ur Dinyé’s most powerful city?”
Sarai’s neck almost cracked with how quickly she spun to face her. “So, if Clan Kader was still extant, they would have a vested interest in seeing Edessa fall,” she mused.
The Bridger watched her for a long moment, looking oddly disconcerted. “You think that’s why your Magus Supreme raced off? You think they survived?”
I know they did.Sarai simply nodded.
“Well, they did exist long before the monarchy and Tetrarchy. It stands to reason that they’d hope to outlast the latter too.” Still looking perturbed, Méherre rose with a heavy exhale and scowled at the Guildsmen still arguing with the tavern-owner. “I’ll go break that up. Last thing we need is a civil war breaking out here.”
We’re close enough to it already.Sarai considered everything she had heard on Clan Kader while strolling through the stalls. A bladesmith at thefar corner of the market cajoled her toward his wares. She had begun seriously considering a dagger when a voice spoke at her shoulder.
“This is unexpected.”
She jumped. Behind her, a familiar half-veiled man in blue robes chuckled and stepped away. “Forgive me, I seem to startle you all the time.”
