The King's Blood (12 page)

“I will.”

“I can do everything in my power to leave affairs in order, but my power isn’t what it once was.”

In the dim room, Simeon looked already half a ghost. His left eye drooped as if his flesh were ready to fall from the bone beneath. His voice was slurred, and he rested on a mountain of pillows tucked to support his powerless spine. Geder wanted to believe that this could be a terrible illness from which a man might recover, but there was nothing before him to suggest it was true. Simeon began to say something, and then seemed to lose focus for a moment.

“I don’t know why he’s here,” Simeon said.

“You summoned me, Your Majesty.”

“Not you. The other one. By the doorway. And what’s he wearing?” Simeon sounded annoyed. And then frightened. “Oh, God. Why is he
wearing
that?”

Geder turned to look at the empty doorway, dread plucking at the skin all down his back. The cunning man put a hand on Geder’s shoulder.

“His majesty won’t be able to help you more tonight,” the cunning man said. “If his mind comes back, we will send for you, yes?”

“Yes,” Geder said. “Thank you.”

The night had only just begun, but the thin moon floated high in the darkness. Geder let a footman help him up into his carriage, and sat with his back against the thin wood. The driver called to the team, and the horses jounced him forward, steel-clad hooves and iron-bound wheels punishing the stone. They were almost to the Silver Bridge when Geder lurched forward and called up through the thin window.

“Not home. Take me to the temple.”

“My lord,” the driver said, and turned.

The torches were lit in their sconces, burning so clean they didn’t leave soot on the columns. The spider-silk banner still hung, but in the darkness the red was as dark as the eightfold sigil. Geder paused on the steps and turned. The city spread out before him, lanterns and candles echoing the stars above them like the reflections on still water. The Kingspire, the Division, the mansions of the highborn and the hovels of the low. All of it would be his to command. To control. He would be protector of the realm, of Antea, of the boy Aster. He would be regent, and so in practice, he would be king, and Antea would answer to his will.

He didn’t hear Basrahip come out, not because the big priest was being quiet, but because Geder’s mind was only halfway in his body. The other half pulled between euphoria and panic.

“Prince Geder?”

The wide face was concerned. Geder sat on the steps. The stone still held some of the day’s heat. Basrahip gathered up the hem of his robes and sat at Geder’s side. For a long moment, the two men sat silently, like children tired at the end of the day looking out into a back alley.

“The king’s going to die,” Geder said. “And I’m going to take his place.”

The priest’s smile was serene.

“The goddess favors you,” he said. “This is how the world is for those who have her blessing.”

Geder turned back. The breeze passed ripples through the dark banner, and a passing dread touched him.

“She’s not… I mean, the goddess isn’t killing the king for me? Is she?”

Basrahip laughed low and warm.

“This is not her way. The world is made from little lives and little deaths because she wills it this way. No, she does not make the waves, she only puts her chosen in the place where they are borne always up by them. She is subtle and she is sure.”

“All right. Good. I just wouldn’t want Aster to lose his father in order for things to go well for me.” Geder lay back, resting his spine against the steps. “I’m going to have to tell him. I don’t know how to do that. How do you tell a boy that his father’s dying?”

“Gently,” Basrahip said.

“And the ambassador from Asterilhold? The one who wanted me to talk the king into a private audience? Now it looks as if I’m going to be the one taking that audience.”

“I will be with you,” Basrahip said.

“The king told me what he wants, though, so at least I know what I’m supposed to do. With that one. And there’ll be people who help me. The regent has advisors just like the king. It won’t be like Vanai where everyone wanted me to fail,” Geder said. A fragment of dream slipped up from the back of his mind. The flames of Vanai danced before him again, silhouetting a single, desperate figure. The voice of the fire roared, and Geder felt the guilt and horror freshly for a moment before he locked it away again. He was the hero of Antea. What happened in Vanai was a good thing. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger. “It won’t be like Vanai.”

“As you say.”

Geder chuckled.

“Alan Klin’s going to shit himself when he hears,” he said with a grin.

“What are you supposed to do?” Basrahip asked.

“Hmm?”

“The ambassador.”

“Oh. Simeon wants me to keep Aster safe and make peace with King Lechan. I told him I would.”

“Ah,” Basrahip said. And a moment later, “And when you cannot do both, which will you choose?”

Marcus

F

rom the fall of dragons to the days still to come, all things human were made and determined by structures made by something greater and crueler. The great monuments were perhaps the least important. The unreachable tower at the center of Lake Esasmadde, the Grave of Dragons in Carse, the Empty Keep. They could inspire fear or awe, they could call forth a sense of mystery, but the greater power lay in the prosaic. The dragon’s roads crossed the nations, and where they met, cities grew, fed by the traffic and advantage that good roads brought. The thirteen races were also constrained by the will of the great masters who had first created them. The Cinnae were thin and pale, unsuited for battle, and so confined themselves to the well-defended hills and valleys of Princip C’Annaldé. Tralgu and Jasuru and Yemmu, bred for violence and formed for war, found their homes in the Keshet where the plains gave no natural barrier against invaders and whatever war won in a given season proved impossible to defend in the next. Where the landscape called for war, the races most suited to war prospered. Where it allowed shelter from violence, those in need of shelter came. The mark of the dragons had been on the world from the beginning of history, and would be until the end of all things.

The mark was there, but it was not changeless.

Around every great city fed by paths of dragon’s jade, there were others—townships, hamlets, some little more than waystations—where the roads were paved by human hands. Where the great roads met, and the great cities grew, the farmlands were, over the course of centuries, used up. The richer soil farther away grew in value, and new places— peculiarly human places—were born.

And as the landscape changed, so did humanity, straining at the bindings woven into its blood. The races were unmistakable and unmixed only in the minds of the people. True, not all races could interbreed. A Cinnae woman could no more bear to a Yemmu man than a rat terrier could whelp a mastiff, and there were other combinations of blood that gave no offspring, or whose issue were themselves sterile. The difficulty of bearing a mixed-breed child allowed the thirteen races to stand apart from one another, but considered carefully, no race but the Drowned was pure. A Tralgu with wider-set, darker eyes might have Southling blood somewhere generations back. Secret marriages between Haaverkin and Jasuru could take place. Between Firstblood and Cinnae, such pairings were merely distasteful and scandalous. History was also marked by less pleasant pairings, and not all women who suffered rape at the hands of enemy soldiers could bring themselves to slaughter the babes that came of the crime.

The history of the races was a complex tissue of love and revulsion, landscape and design, war and trade, secrets and indiscretions. Cithrin bel Sarcour was only one example in Marcus’s broad experience. The man who sat across the low wooden table from him was another. Capsen Gostermak was the child of a Jasuru mother and a Yemmu father. His skin was pocked where the bronze scales of his mother’s race never fully formed and his jaw was crowded with pointed, vicious teeth that were as unlike the Yemmu tusks as Jasuru teeth. He looked like a monster from a children’s story, neither one thing nor another, but entirely built to fight. No one who didn’t know the man would have guessed that he styled himself a poet or that he raised doves.

The house was stone and mortar near the center of Cemmis township. In the falling twilight outside, Capsen’s sons played in among the other children of the township, kicking the body of a dead rat around the base of the dovecote, shrieking with the glee that comes of disgust and the heart-lessness of boys.

“There is a place,” the half-breed said. “It’s not nearby, but it’s not far either. A cove that people don’t go to.”

“Can you guide us there?”

“No,” Capsen said. “I will tell you where to look, but I have a family. This isn’t any business of mine.”

Marcus glanced up at the doorway. Yardem Hane leaned against the stone frame, arms crossed and expression unreadable. It was half a day back to Porte Oliva along a road that followed the shore. Marcus didn’t like both of them being away from the bank and its safebox, but Yardem had insisted that he not come alone. Outside, a child screamed in what could have been pain or joy.

“All right,” Marcus said. “Two weights of silver for a map. Another two if our pirates are there when we get there.”

“Paying me to talk and paying me to keep quiet?”

“You win both ways,” Marcus said.

Capsen rose and walked to the cupboard. It was made from wood that the tide brought to the beach, and it left the room smelling faintly of tar and salt. As Marcus watched, he reached to the top shelf and brought down a bit of parchment a bit wider than Marcus’s hand. Dark ink marked it.

He put it on the table and Marcus picked it up. The curve of the coastline was unmistakable, and four good landmarks were already drawn in and labeled. The man had been prepared. That was either a very good thing or a bad one. If the township was ready to help him against the pirates, it made recovering the cargo more likely. If Capsen thought someone was going to be brought to justice, it would be a little more awkward.

But that was for later. Marcus took a pouch off his belt and pulled out four measures of silver and put them on the table. Then two more. Capsen’s eyebrows rose.

“For the name,” Marcus said. “I like to know who I’m fighting.”

“Why do you think I know his name?”

Marcus shrugged and reached for the extra coins.

“Rinál. Maceo Rinál. He’s some sort of noble blood in Cabral.”

“All right, then,” Marcus said, folding the map and tucking it in his belt. “Good talking with you.”

“We’ll be seeing you again, I hope?”

Marcus ducked through the door and Yardem fell in behind him. The sea stretched out to the south, the calm grey of lead. The last red and gold of sunset still haunted the western horizon. Part of him wanted to take the horse now, go farther west. The cove wouldn’t be farther than the two of them could ride by midnight. In the worst case, they’d be discovered, and then at least there’d be a fight.

But his men were in Porte Oliva. And Cithrin was waiting for word. Going farther was a risk he didn’t need to take, not now, but it was a temptation. A restlessness looking for escape.

“Sir?”

Let’s just take a look
floated at the back of his tongue.

“We head to the city,” he said. “We’ll get some blades behind us and come back.”

Yardem’s ears rose.

“What? That’s a surprise?”

“Almost expected we’d be going on, sir.”

“That’d be stupid.”

“I don’t disagree, sir. Just thought it might be the mistake we made.”

Marcus shrugged and headed back for the horses, troubled by the knowledge that if he’d been alone, he would have done it.

They made camp in a stand of green oaks, their horses tied to an ancient altar tucked away among the trees, ivy-covered, eroded and forgotten. In the morning, Marcus broke the night’s fast with a strip of salt-dried goat and a handful of limp springpeas still in the pod. Approaching Porte Oliva from the west was harder terrain than it looked. The hills were green with grass and heather, but it was uneven. Broken stones hid everywhere, ready to turn under a misplaced hoof. There was a story that a king of Old Cabral had launched an invasion of Birancour along this coast, only to have his cavalry lamed before the first battle. Marcus didn’t believe it, but he didn’t disbelieve it either.

The high, pale walls seemed darker with the sun behind them. The traffic into and out of the city was choked with beggars, but he was well enough known in the city now that they bothered him less. That group of liars and thieves were better attuned to travelers, as if by smelling of Porte Oliva he were already complicit in the wrenching stories of sick babies and the twisted legs that worked better when no one was looking. To be ignored by the beggars was a mark of citizenship, and even though it was invisible, Marcus wore it now. In the midst of the stalls and the houses and the complex web of streets, he passed through the fortification wall and then into the city proper.

Marcus was just leaving the stables when an unexpected voice called his name. By the mouth of a small side street stood a long-faced man with tall, wiry hair and the olive complexion of Pût. He wore a simple brown robe and carried a walking staff that was black from use where he held it. For the first time in weeks, Marcus felt a grin come to his mouth unbidden.

“Kit? What are you doing here?”

“I hoped I would find you, actually,” the master actor said. “And Yardem Hane! I am pleased to see you again. I think the city life must be agreeing with you, yes? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you looking so healthy.”

“He means fat,” Marcus said.

“Knew what he meant, sir,” Yardem said, feigning displeasure. Then he broke into a wide, canine grin. “I didn’t expect the company to come back so soon.”

Master Kit hesitated.

“They haven’t. I’ve been traveling on my own. I was hoping to talk to you about that, Marcus. If you have time for it. If you have business with Yardem, of course, I wouldn’t want to interrupt it.”