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with the dawn. Except that Sir Alan Klin was there, his leather riding cloak hanging from his shoulders and his sword of office at his hip. The master of provender, a half-Yemmu mountain of a man, was taking orders from the captain. Geder’s rank technically gave him the right to interrupt, but he didn’t. He waited.
    “Palliako,” Klin said. The warmth of the previous night was gone.
    “My lord,” Geder said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but when I woke up this morning… after last night…”
    “Spit it out, man.”
    “I had a book, sir.”
    Sir Alan Klin closed his noble, long-lashed eyes.
    “I thought we’d finished with that.”
    “We did, sir? So you know the book? I showed it to you?”
    The captain opened his eyes, glancing about at the ordered chaos of the breaking camp. Geder felt like a boy bothering a harried tutor.
    “Speculative essay,” Klin said. “Palliako, really? Speculative essay?”
    “More for the exercise in translation,” Geder lied, suddenly ashamed of his true enthusiasm.
    “It was… courageous of you to admit the vice,” Klin said. “And I think you made the right decision in destroying it.”
    Geder’s heart knocked against his ribs.
    “Destroying it, sir?”
    Alan looked at him, surprise on his face. Or possibly mock surprise.
    “We burned it last night,” the captain said. “The two of us together, just after I took you back to your tent. Don’t you remember?”
    Geder didn’t know whether the man was lying or not. The night was a blur. He remembered so little. Was it possible that, lost in his cups, he had forsworn his little failure of sophistication and permitted it to be set to fire? Or was Sir Alan Klin, his captain and commander, lying to his face? Neither seemed plausible, but one or the other had to be true. And to admit not knowing was to confess that he couldn’t hold his wine and prove again that he was the joke of the company.
    “I’m sorry, sir,” Geder said. “I must have been a little muddled. I understand now.”
    “Be careful with that.”
    “It won’t happen again.”
    Geder saluted, and then, before Klin could respond, stalked off to his mount. It was a gelding grey, the best his family could afford. He lifted himself to the saddle and yanked the reins. The horse turned sharply, surprised by his violence, and Geder felt a stab of regret through his rage. It wasn’t the animal’s fault. He promised himself to give the beast a length of sugarcane when they stopped. If they stopped. If this twice-damned campaign didn’t drag on to the end of all days and the return of the dragons.
    They took to the road, the army moving at the deliberate pace of men who knew the walk wouldn’t end. The hard march began, rank following rank down the wide, dragon’s jade road. Geder sat high in his saddle, holding his spine straight and proud out of sheer will and anger. He had been humiliated before. Likely he would be humiliated again. But Sir Alan Klin had burned his book. As the morning sun rose, the heat drawing cloaks from shoulders, the glorious leaves of autumn glowing around them, Geder realized that he had already sworn his oath of vengeance. And he’d done it standing before his new and mortal enemy.
    It won’t happen again,
he’d said.
    And it wouldn’t.

Cithrin Bel Sarcour Ward of the Medean Bank
     
    C ithrin’s only vivid memory of her parents was being told of their deaths. Before that, there were only wisps, less than ghosts, of the people themselves. Her father was a warm embrace in the rain and the smell of tobacco. Her mother was the taste of honey on bread and the thin, graceful hand of a Cinnae woman stroking Cithrin’s leg. She didn’t know their faces or the sounds of their voices, but she remembered losing them.
    She had been four years old. Her nursery had been painted in white and plum. She’d been sitting by the window, drinking tea with a stuffed Tralgu made of brown sacking and stuffed with dried beans. She’d been