The King's Blood (21 page)

“I’m going to make you an offer now,” Marcus said. “I don’t mean any offense by it. It’s not the bank doing it, it’s me. You’ve got all this and no place for it. Your things are going to rot in the street. Won’t do you any good. I’ll give you thirty weight in silver for the whole thing, and you can walk away. Start over.”

The tears were falling from the man’s eyes, beading on his oily, otter-fine fur like dewdrops.

“Worth more,” he choked.

“Not lying on the street, it’s not,” Marcus said.

“I need my puppets. It’s how I live.”

“You can keep three of the puppets, then. Same price.”

Despair washed over the man’s expression as he looked at his chests and clothes, a great plaster vase with cut flowers wilting in it. The crowd looked on in amusement or false sympathy.

“I was going to pay,” the man said softly.

“You weren’t,” Marcus said. “And that’s all past now. Take your dolls and your silver, and go try again, all right?”

The man nodded. More tears. Marcus pressed a wallet with the silver into the man’s hand.

“All right, let’s load all this up except whichever three puppets he wants, and take it back to the warehouse.”

“Yes, sir,” Yardem said. “And after?”

“Bathhouse. I’m feeling a touch soiled.”

*    *    *

T

he summer in Porte Oliva was a bandit. It hid behind the soft sea breeze and the long, comfortable evenings. It spoke in the friendly and reassuring tones of surf and birdcall. If at midday the sun felt like a hand pushing down against his shoulder, Marcus could still call it companionable. The attack would come—blazing days and sweat-filled nights. The Kurtadam would shave themselves back almost to stubble. The Firstblood and the Cinnae would abandon modesty in favor of comfort. The business of the day would stop just after midday, the city falling into fevered dreams until evening when the summer sun lost some of its violence.

The attack wasn’t there yet. The spring was still lulling them all into lowering their guard. But it would come.

Cithrin was over two weeks gone, and likely on the water between Sara-sur-Mar and Carse. The days without her had been made from the same cloth as those with—payments to deliver, the strongbox to watch, the payments to retrieve. Now and then, a client or partner would need a few swords to walk with someone or something. Now that Pyk’s role was uncontested, she seemed to calm a bit, but she still generated a dozen minor tasks that had to be done and complained at the money it cost to accomplish them. So in a sense, nothing had changed, and in a sense it all had.

“I’m going to go after her,” Marcus said.

Yardem sat forward, drinking his beer carefully. His silence was thoughtful and disapproving. Marcus leaned forward over the rough plank table. It wasn’t their customary taproom. Three young Jasuru boys, their scales bright as green-snakes, played drums in the yard, the complex rhythms making the air richer. Marcus took his bowl of beef and snow peas, looked at it, and put it down again.

“I was thinking about coming from Vanai when Cithrin was passing herself as a boy,” he said.

Yardem nodded.

“You’d be in a dress then, sir?”

“I could go in carter’s clothes. Or as a merchant. It isn’t as if I’d need to announce myself. Just ride in, stay quiet, and when she’s ready to come back I can travel with her then.”

“Why?”

“Not much point in staying hidden when I’m heading away, is there?”

“I mean why would you go after her, sir? What’s the advantage?”

“I’d think that was obvious. Keep her safe.”

Yardem sighed.

“What?” Marcus said. “Go ahead. You know you want to say it. Tell me she’s in no danger, and that Corisen Mout and Barth can keep her as safe as anyone. She’s heading toward a war. A real one, not one of the little shell games like who runs Maccia. She doesn’t understand how that kind of violence can spread. And you know that’s true.”

“If you think three blades would make her safe where two won’t, why not send someone else, sir? Enen’s been to Carse.”

Yardem’s dark eyes met his. Yardem’s ironic subservience had become such a habit over the years that Marcus sometimes forgot the hardness that could take the Tralgu’s features. In moments like this, it was easy to believe that the Tralgu had been bred for the hunt and the kill as well as a deadly kind of loyalty. Marcus silently hefted a few arguments, but under Yardem’s implacable gaze, they all seemed like felling a tree with a toenail knife.

“You want her to be in trouble, sir, but she isn’t.”

Marcus’s impatience shifted. He felt his own gaze cool.

“Meaning what?”

Yardem flicked an ear, the rings jingling, and turned back to his mug. When he started to lift it, Marcus put his palm over its mouth and pressed it back down to the table.

“Asked you a question.”

Yardem let go of the beer.

“After Ellis, sir, you looked for revenge.”

“I looked for justice.”

“If you say so,” Yardem said, refusing to be turned. “I was with you for that. Not like we are now, but I was there. I saw it happen. You didn’t only kill Springmere. You planned it, you built it. You made sure that he could see his death coming, understood it, and couldn’t do anything to stop it. And when he was dead, you thought it would be better. Not fixed. You’re not stupid, but you thought that…
justice
… would redeem something. Only it didn’t.”

“I am just certain you have an argument in this somewhere,” Marcus said. “Because I just know you aren’t hauling Alys and Merian out of their graves to score cheap points.”

“I’m not, sir,” Yardem said. There was nothing like apology in his voice. “I’m saying you didn’t only kill Springmere because he needed to die. You were looking for redemption.”

“More of your religious—”

“And you were looking to Cithrin for the same,” Yardem said, refusing to be silenced. “She was a girl and she was at the mercy of a merciless world. We helped her. Hatred didn’t bring you peace, and somewhere in your soul, you thought that love would. And here we are, Cithrin bel Sarcour saved, only you still don’t have the redemption you wanted. So you’re trying to tell yourself and everyone else that she still needs saving when she doesn’t. She’s fine, sir.”

“I didn’t want to work for her,” Marcus said. “I wanted to walk away. You were the one who argued that we should go back. That was you.”

“It was. But that was when she needed us.”

“The way she doesn’t need us now?”

“Yes, sir. The way she doesn’t now,” Yardem said, his voice going soft and gentle in a way that was worse than shouting. “We have steady work for fair pay. We have shelter and we have food. Interesting if that’s not what we were looking for.”

“We spend our days taking people’s houses and throwing them out in the street. How’s that a way to live?”

“Used to be, we’d kill them, sir,” Yardem said. “Not sure this is worse.”

Marcus rose to his feet. The drumbeats throbbing out from the yard reached their crisis and collapsed. In the silence, Marcus’s voice was louder than he’d meant it to be.

“You can pay for your own damn drinks.”

“Yes, sir.”

The other men and women in the taproom cleared space as he stalked out, eyes both wide and averted. If any of them had spoken to him, there would have been blows over it, but no one did. In the street, the evening sun was turning the high clouds to red and gold—blood and coins. The sky behind them seemed bluer by comparison. Marcus took himself back north, toward the Grand Market and the café, the barracks and the counting house. The puppeteers haunted the street corners, calling to the crowds for attention and coppers. When his anger had cooled from white to a dull and aching redness, Marcus stopped for a few minutes by one. It was a simple retelling of the usual PennyPenny the Jasuru. The main puppet was nicely made, painted to give the impression of scales, and used convincingly enough that the puppet seemed to have emotions of its own. Not that PennyPenny required much more than surprise, rage, and remorse. When the hero threw his wife and baby down a well, Marcus tossed a copper into the collecting bag and walked on.

Everything came back to that. Blood and death and the impotence of violence. In the PennyPenny shows, the wife and child would return transformed into agents of retribution, but even then, the answer was only the torture and death of the Jasuru. There was no reconciliation. No chance for time to move backward and the things that were lost to be recovered. That was the story Marcus wanted to see. Except that even if he did, he wouldn’t be convinced by it.

From spite as much as anything, he revisited his plan. A good horse and enough coin for fair exchange on the road would get him to Carse. He could take a room or light work in the Firstblood’s quarter without anyone particularly taking note of him. Probably. The Medean bank wouldn’t be difficult to find, and then he could find a place to sit and play the beggar until Cithrin went in or out, and then…

He paused at the mouth of an alley and spat into the shadows. It had all seemed plausible that morning.

The squat little building across from the gymnasium hadn’t been built as a barracks, but now it was. The marks of its other lives were still on it: the patched holes where some great mechanism had been mounted to the walls, then taken out and the walls patched with stone of a different color. The easternmost roof beam blackened by some ancient fire. A series of notches chiseled into stone to mark the growth, year by year, of some long-forgotten child. Perhaps it had been a school or the sort of overcrowded house where ten different families lived all within each other’s lives. In winter, the heat came from a bric-kmaker’s stove so old that the ironwork was worn almost as thin as cloth.

The men and women within were his company. The private guard of the Medean bank. In practice, there were few of them there except late at night when they would come in from work or leisure, string hammocks or unfurl bedrolls, and sleep together out of wind and weather. Now there was only Roach, the brown-chitined Timzinae boy whose true name no one used. And less a boy than he’d been when Marcus hired him.

“All well, Captain?”

“Apart from it being a corrupt and fallen world,” Marcus said, and the boy laughed as if it were a joke. Marcus shouldered his bedroll and climbed to the roof. A pigeon startled when he pushed open the trap, flailing at the air in panic. Marcus unrolled his bed, and then lay back and watched the clouds grey and the sky darken. Voices came from the street and from the barracks beneath him. His mind kept returning to Alys and Merian. The family he’d had, back when he’d been the kind of man who could have a family. Alys’s dark hair with its threadings of grey. Merian’s long face, slightly indignant from the moment she’d left her mother’s womb. He could still hear his little girl laughing in her crib, could still recall pressing his lips to his wife’s neck just where it turned to shoulder. The brilliant young general, champion and Lord Marshal of the rightful heir, Lian Springmere. He’d been going to remake the world, back then.

It was more than a decade now since Alys and Merian stopped feeling all pain. Some days he could barely remember their faces. Some days, he had the physical certainty that they were in the room with him, invisible and sorrowful and accusing. Grief did things to men, but knowing that didn’t help.

It was full dark when the trap opened again. Marcus knew without looking that it was Yardem. The tall Tralgu folded his legs beside Marcus’s head.

“Pyk was asking for you, sir. Wants to know why things you’ve bought are in the bank’s warehouse.”

“Because I’m guard captain for the bank.”

“She might find that more convincing from you.”

“Unless she wants to go haul it to the street herself, the reason doesn’t much matter.”

Yardem chuckled.

“What?” Marcus said.

“That was the argument I offered her too. She didn’t seem to find the prospect interesting.”

“That, old friend,” Marcus said, “is a powerfully unpleasant woman.”

“Is.”

“Still. She’s not the worst I’ve worked for.”

“Quite a bit of room in that, sir.”

“Fair point.”

The pigeon or one like it landed on the edge of the building, considering the pair with one wet, black eye and then the other.

“Well, Yardem. The day you throw me in a ditch and take over the company?”

“Sir?”

“It’s not today.”

“Good to know, sir.”

“Do you think Merian would have made a good banker?”

“Hard to say, sir. I imagine she would have if she’d decided to be.”

“I think I’m going to get some rest. Face the Pyk in the morning.”

“Yes, sir. Also?” Yardem cleared his throat, a deep and distant rumble. “If I went too far…”

“Going too far’s your job. When it’s called for, you should always go too far. Everyone else respects me too much,” Marcus said. “Well, except for Kit.”

“I’ll remember that, sir.”

Yardem rose and padded away. The moon hid behind dark clouds. The stars came out, first one, and then a handful, and then a host so large as to beggar the imagination. Marcus watched them until his mind began to slide sideways of its own accord, and he pulled his blanket around him. The smell of roasting pork flirted and vanished, borne on the fickle breeze.

When the nightmare came, as he had known it would, it was almost the same as always. The flames, the screaming, the feeling of the small body, dead in his arms. Only this time, there were three figures in the fire. He woke before he could tell if Cithrin was the third or if he was.

Cithrin

I

n facing her first sea voyage, Cithrin had expected many of the hardships that came with being in a ship: the nausea and the close quarters and the fear of knowing that her life depended on the ship remaining afloat without any particular control over whether it did. All had proven real, though few as unpleasant as she had anticipated they would be. The surprise was how much the enforced inactivity calmed her. At any time of day or night, she would take herself to the deck, lean against the rail, and consider the waves or the distant dark line of the coast as it slipped past. There was nothing she could do, and so there was nothing required of her. If she willed the ship on faster toward Carse or grew homesick for her little rooms above the counting house, it made no difference, and before long she found herself simply inhabiting the moment. She was one of the first to see the Drowned.