Free The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) by Daniel Abraham Page B

to be provisioning from Northcoast and Narinisle. It won’t make much difference to a bag of feed whether it was bought with metal or paper. Tastes just the same after.”
    “Still,” the Yemmu said.
    “We could do the provisioning, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Captain Moss takes coin for his wages, we give him the horses and the food. Any arms or armor.”
    It was a suggestion Cithrin had fed to the Tralgu before the meeting. He’d brought it up a little sooner than she’d hoped, but it was close enough. She made a show of thinking about it. “Ninety on the hundred for that, but yes. We could.”
    “Let’s not get too far ahead on ourselves.”
    “Of ourselves,” Marcus said. “
Of
. Not
on
.”
    Moss shrugged, but the correction had hit home. That was fine. Marcus made an accomplished hard party. He was older, a man, and Marcus Wester. She was younger, slighter and paler than a full Firstblood, and a woman. If Moss was like the others, he’d play to her.
    “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” Moss said, and Cithrin made a silent note that he’d accepted Marcus’s correction. “What’s the work we’re doing here? My men are hard as stone and sharper’n axes, but if you’re putting us against Antea in the field—”
    “We aren’t. Their army’s going to fall back. We want you to… clean where they’ve been. Look for people who’ve been taken by the spiders. Whoever you find, you burn.”
    “Hunters, then,” Moss said, sucked noisily at his teeth, and shrugged. “We can do that, yeah. If your price is right.”
    “There’s risks,” Cithrin said. “We’re working to have Birancour’s permission, but if the queen doesn’t agree, it won’t change our contract.”
    “You paying me or is she?” Moss said. Cithrin felt a knot in her belly untie.
    “I’m paying you.”
    “All right, then,” Moss said. “We won’t bother the queensmen if they don’t bother us. Plenty of peace to get kept, I figure. Enough to go around anyway.”
    “One thing,” Marcus said. “If one of the queensmen has the little fuckers in his blood? Even if he’s captain or lord of whatever town you’re passing through…”
    “He burns,” Moss said. “I understand. But what’s the money?”
    The negotiation went on for the better part of an hour as they worked through the details—how much for a sword-and-bow, how much for a horse, how much for a cunning man; the length of the contract; the payment schedule; the bonus for every one of the tainted they burned; the standard of evidence they had to provide for it. The cold bonus. The penalty for killing outside their mandate. It wasn’t her first pass through this particular area of contract law, and having Marcus and Yardem talk her through the logic of it all beforehand let her seem more experienced than she was. When it was done, Cithrin shook Dantag Moss’s huge, thick hand. The contracts would be drawn up in three days. They’d cut thumbs on it and sign, and she’d hand over the initial payment—hard coin for the men, war gold for the provisions. If it had all been coin, it wouldn’t have happened.
    She stepped out to the street, Marcus and Yardem behind her, and turned to the north. The sky was white from horizon to horizon. Snow melted in the sunlight and glowed bluish in the shadows. Carse wasn’t a beautiful city. It was too open, too austere. She had grown up in the close streets and canals of Vanai, come to her full power in the dense humanity of Porte Oliva. Even the fivefold city of Suddapal—where she’d been as out of place as a candle for the Drowned—had been more beautiful in its way. Carse was unnerving, she realized again, because it was built on the scale of dragons.
    Inys could walk through these streets, his tattered wings folded behind him. He could perch in the square or throw himself down to weep among the claw-marks of theGraveyard of Dragons. Children might roll hoops in its squares and alleys, food carts could