The King's Blood

Cithrin

The reports were completed and sealed, the pages sewn shut and wax pressed all around with the seal of the Medean bank interspersed with Pyk’s personal sign. With all the work that had gone into them, Cithrin had expected something more. Four slim volumes, bound in leather. The notary’s report on everything about the Porte Oliva bank would fit into a satchel. The time had come to decide the details of her journey, and Cithrin, for all her preparation, wasn’t sure.

The speed at which information traveled was the enemy of certainty. A cunning man’s ritual might pass a simple, urgent message from Porte Oliva to Carse in as little as two days. A pigeon could fly there in five and be more reliable. A single courier on a fast horse could cross the wide plains of Birancour, stopping at the posts and wayhouses, and reach Sara-sur-Mar in ten days’ time, and then by ship to Carse in another five so long as no bandits caught him and the weather on the coast was favorable. A caravan would be even slower, but safer. If she’d wanted it, Cithrin could have planned half a season on the road there and back again.

She had sat in her room at night with the dragon’s tooth and map before her and imagined the different journeys she might take, letting herself debate whether to stop in Sara-sur-Mar for a time and make her introductions to the queen’s court, whether to take ship directly from Porte Oliva and see the ports in Cabral and Herez along her way, whether to leave by herself dressed as a courier and ride alone in the wide world. Every new version seemed sweeter, more enchanting, more real than the last. She’d settled on a middle way. Marcus and Yardem Hane and herself, traveling on the dragon’s roads all along the way. A small group would move quickly, and the trained blades and little promise of gain would discourage most of the trouble that might come. Rather than pack the dresses and paints and formal attire she’d want in Carse, she would take a letter of credit and purchase them there.

Then came the news of war.

“No,” Marcus said. “Not overland. There’ll be refugees on all the roads through Northcoast. Thick in the last parts of Birancour too, for that matter.”

The counting house was empty apart from the three of them—Marcus, Cithrin, and Pyk. The chalked duty roster showed half a dozen names, but most of them were on the road back from Cemmis township under Yardem’s command, and the others Marcus had set to wait in the street. Their voices were audible, but Cithrin couldn’t make out any words. Her map was stretched out on the floor, with all of them looking at it as if there was a secret message hidden in its lines. Birancour in the south, with the smaller kingdoms clustered around it. Northcoast above and to the right, looking down at it like a disapproving older brother. And beyond it, the war.

“Sea’s a problem too,” Pyk said, sucking at her teeth.

“Why?” Cithrin asked.

“We did just burn a pirate’s ship down to the waterline,” Marcus said. “Might want to give a little time before we offer him a chance at bloody vengeance.”

Pyk’s expression darkened, but she didn’t speak. Cithrin hadn’t gone to the woman until Marcus had returned with confirmation that their scheme had worked. She’d left the notary in an uncomfortable place. Cithrin had taken action on the bank’s behalf without Pyk’s knowledge, but there had been no formal negotiation, no papers to sign. Nothing she’d done violated the terms under which Cithrin was bound. Only the spirit and intention of the thing was compromised, and in the process, the losses of the Stormcrow’s insurance contract would be at least partly recovered. Pyk could be unhappy about how it had been done, but the results allowed her as little room for open complaint as for pleasure.

“Overland to Sara-sur-Mar and then by ship,” Pyk said. “Cuts out the waters near Cabral and keeps her far enough west she’ll miss the worst of it.”

“Likely the best route,” Marcus said. “It does pass through some rough territory in the center. The farmlands are taxed hard. There’s places where the locals see travelers as either predators or prey.”

“That’s truth,” Pyk said, though she sounded less worried about it than pleased. “The reports will want guarding.”

“I don’t want a full caravan,” Cithrin said. “Just Marcus and Yardem will be fine, I think.”

“The hell they will,” Pyk said.

“That’s not a choice you get to make,” Marcus said.

The Yemmu woman’s thick lips went slack in surprise.

“You’re serious?” she said. “And here I was starting to think you weren’t an idiot. Or am I the only one who’s thought through the implications? Northcoast was on the edge of a fresh war of succession last year. King Tracian’s ass has barely warmed up his throne. Now Asterilhold—his neighbor with the longest and least defensible border—is marching into the field against Imperial Antea.”

“Your point being?” Cithrin asked archly.

“You want to go there with Marcus Wester in tow? Because the way I remember it, last time he was in Northcoast he killed their king.”

“And gave the throne to Lady Tracian,” Marcus said.

“So now that it’s her nephew wearing the crown, maybe you’ve come to take it back,” Pyk said. “If I were king of Northcoast and you came waltzing back into my kingdom with sword music already singing in my ears, you know what I’d do? Lock your pretty little ass up just to be on the safe side. And I’d start looking pretty damn funny at whoever it was that brought you, and I don’t mean the magistra here.”

“I’ll be fine,” Marcus said.

Pyk hoisted her eyebrows but didn’t say anything more. A shout came from the street, and then laughter. A single sharp rap on the door announced Yardem Hane. The Tralgu’s ears were canted forward, giving him an earnest, attentive look.

“It’s all in the warehouse, sir.”

“You have a full list?” Pyk snapped.

Yardem walked across the room and gave the woman a handful of papers, but Cithrin’s attention was still on the map, her mind turning over the journey still ahead. A tightness she hadn’t expected was knotting her belly. In the corner of her vision, Pyk ran a scarred thumb down the list. The hiss of paper against paper when she moved the second page was like an impatient sigh.

“This isn’t ours,” she said, tapping at the page.

“Is now,” Marcus said. “It’s in our warehouse.”

“Oh, really?” Pyk said. “And when some salt quarter merchant files claim with the governor, is that what you’re telling the magistrate? Well, we took it from a pirate, so it’s ours? If we don’t have papers proving our right to have it, get it out of my warehouse.”

Cithrin pressed a fingertip against the northern coast, tracing it from Northcoast to Asterilhold to Antea. She had fled Antean swords before now. The Imperial Army had taken Vanai, and some Antean governor had burned it. They would remember that. The border between the combatants was a river flowing up from the marshes in the south and spilling into the northern sea. Only a single dragon’s road crossed the water like a gate in a wall. The sea would be, if anything, the wider battleground. When the nobles and merchants of Asterilhold fled west, away from the enemy, Northcoast would be the only place to escape to.

“Yes, they are. Salvage rights are rights,” Marcus was saying. Cithrin realized she’d missed part of the conversation.

“When it’s your name taking the risk, you can keep anything stolen from anyone and you go to the carcer for it. I’m—”

“I’d like to speak with the captain alone now, please,” Cithrin said. Three sets of eyes turned to look at her. Pyk and Marcus both smoldered with anger. Yardem was unreadable as always. “Just Marcus. Just for a moment.”

Pyk made a spitting sound, but didn’t spit. Her rolling gait made her seem like a ship caught on high seas as she strode out. Yardem nodded, flicked one ear, and retreated, pulling the door to behind him.

“That woman is a disaster,” Marcus said, pointing two fingers at the door. “I think they sent her just to punish us.”

“They probably did,” Cithrin said. “That’s part of why she’s right.”

“She’s not, though. As soon as Rinál took those crates, he—”

“Not about that. About Carse. I can’t take you.”

Marcus crossed his arms and leaned against the high table that was the last remnant of the old gambler’s desk. His expression was empty.

“I see,” he said.

“I’m going to Carse to win over Komme Medean,” she said. “If I’m bringing a scandal along with me, it doesn’t help. And you’re Marcus Wester. You’re the man who killed the Mayfly King. I forget that because I know you. And you don’t make that who you are. But for the rest of the world, and especially the court in Northcoast, they won’t hear your name without thinking of armies and dead kings. I need Komme Medean to like me. Or respect me.”

His lips pressed white, sharp lines of anger drawing themselves down the sides of his mouth. For a long moment, Cithrin had the sick feeling that he was about to resign. Quit her and the bank and everything else. Then he looked at her and he softened.

“Well,” he said. A dog yelped and a man’s voice cursed not far away. Marcus scratched his cheek, the sound like sand falling against paper. “I suppose someone’s got to keep an eye on Pyk.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll still need guards. If it’s not me and Yardem, you’ll need four at least. We’re just that good.” Cithrin smiled and Marcus managed to smile back. “Just… just promise me you’ll be safe. I have a bad history of losing people in Northcoast.”

“I promise,” she said.

For all that Cithrin had remade herself as an upstanding and important citizen of Birancour, she had never been inland farther than the coastal mountains and foothills that separated it from the Free Cities, and then in the grip of winter. She had imagined it all to be like that—rolling hills and stones punctuated by forests and meadows. The land between the Free Cities had been like that where it hadn’t been mud and snow. It was only when she passed out from the last trailing houses and farms of Porte Oliva that she saw the wide, open sweep of the land and heard the voice of the grass singing for the first time in her life.

The interior of Birancour was flat, without so much as a hill to break the horizon, and the dragon’s jade road passed through it. Cithrin found herself imagining that the road was a living thing that folded in on itself behind them and rose up before, a companion sea serpent escorting her across the oceanic grass. If she’d been asked, she would have said that the sound of tall grass shifting in the breeze would be like a scratching, like rubbing handfuls of straw together. It was like walking under a waterfall. Even the lightest breath of wind roared, and after the third day, Cithrin began to hear things inside it—voices and music, flutes and drums and once a vast choir of voices lifted together in song.

Farmhouses and cultivated fields seemed to rise up and fall away like images from a dream. She almost expected the men and women they met on the road to be some new, unknown race, or to speak with the hush of the grasslands in their voices, but instead they were Firstblood and Cinnae, their faces leathery with the sun and palms yellow and callused. The people seemed so familiar and common and prosaic that Cithrin began to tell herself it was only the unfamiliarity and her own anxiety that made the place seem somehow less than real. When a massive creature easily half the size of her own horse but black and wet-looking with dagger teeth and an improbably ornate and flowerlike nose slid across the road before them, it took her guard’s yelp of alarm to convince her it was real.

In the end and despite his joke, Marcus had sent only two guards with her. Two Firstbloods named Barth and Corisen Mout. When night came without a wayhouse or caravanserai, one would take his horse out into the grass, walking it in a circle like a dog until a round space had been crushed down. Even though the grass was wet and green, they didn’t start fires.

Cithrin lay in her tiny leather sleeping tent, one arm out before her and her head pillowed on the flesh of it. The top of it was only a few inches above her, and it held the heat of her body surprisingly well. She was shakingly tired, her back and legs sore from riding. The knot in her gut was like an old, unwelcome companion, returned when it was least wanted, and it would not let her sleep. So she feigned it, closing her eyes when she remembered to and trying without success or hope not to listen to her guardsmen talking. Gossiping. About Marcus.

“The way I heard it, Springmere knew the captain was the only reason he was winning the war,” Barth said. “Got to where he’d scared himself half crazy that he was going to switch sides. So after the battle of Ellis, Springmere got a bunch of the uniforms off Lady Tracian’s dead, put his own men in them, and sent ’em after the captain’s family. Held the captain down while his wife and baby burned.”

“Wasn’t a baby,” Corisen Mout said. “Girl was six, seven years old.”

“His little girl, then.”

“Just saying she wasn’t a baby. How’d the captain find out it was a trick?”

“Don’t know. Wasn’t until after Lady Tracian’d been put in the stocks, though.”

“I thought he knew before and was just playing along. Spent a year finishing the war and letting Springmere get himself king and feel like he was safe before he brought the bastard down.”

“Might have been. There anything left in that skin?”

Cithrin heard the sloshing of wine. The blades of grass at the camp’s edge shifted in near-silence, and she realized she’d opened her eyes again. Scowling, she pressed them closed.

“One way or the other, Springmere gets himself made king of Northcoast, starts riding back for Carse, ready to take control of the place. Sitting in his tent, making lists of all the heads he’s going to chop off, when the captain comes in and explains how he knows what happened. Next thing anyone knows, Wester’s drenched in blood with an axe in his hand. Walks to the stocks, chops Lady Tracian loose, and gives her this crown that’s still got bits of Springmere on it, says it’s hers now for all he cares. And after that… gone. Steps out of history until there he was in Porte Oliva hiring guards for the magistra.”

The round, hissing sound of wine being squirted into someone’s mouth.

“You think he’s in love with the magistra?”

“Barth! She’s—”

“Ah, she’s asleep for hours. Seriously, though. Here he is, could build himself a private army, take garrison work at four, five times what we’re making now. But he stays there. There’s half the girls in the taproom would lay back for him, and he’s careful as glass never to let any of them think he means anything.”

“No, it’s just he’s still being faithful to his dead wife. Can’t be with a woman except he starts thinking about her.”

“Eh, I think he’s mad for the magistra.”

“I’m telling you it’s old grief turned to stone in him,” Corisen Mout said. “Besides, the magistra’s a sweet face, but she’s got no tits.”

“Oh, brother mine,” Barth said with a chuckle, “you had best pray she’s asleep—”

“I’m not,” Cithrin said.

The silence seemed to last forever. She pulled herself out of the tent, then stood. The starlight leached the two men of all color. Their expressions were contrite. The wineskin was in Barth’s hand. She walked over and took it from him.

“You’ve had more than enough. Sleep now,” she said. “Both of you.”

Without another word, the two men curled up in their bedrolls. Cithrin stood over them until she started to feel ridiculous and then went back to her little tent. The conversation had stopped, but Cithrin lay in the darkness awake all the same. The wine wasn’t the best she’d had, but it wasn’t the worst. After half the skin, it began to loosen the knot in her belly, the way she remembered it doing the first time she’d taken to the road. Her eyes closed more easily now with the alcohol softening her body and making everything seem slightly more benign. When her mind turned to Marcus—he couldn’t be in love with her, could he? It would be like Magister Imaniel wanting her as a bride. He was handsome enough, but he was so old—she consciously turned toward the fine work of trade. The losses for the Stormcrow were going to be listed in the report, but the gains from its recovery wouldn’t. She needed to make sure they knew that at the holding company. And that Pyk hadn’t wanted to invoke salvage on the recovered cargo that wasn’t part of their insurance contract.

She began to wonder how a contract would be worded to protect recovered goods from then being recovered by someone else. It would be possible, she supposed, but she hadn’t seen it done. She’d need to know what the magistrates thought about it. If they were all agreed that Pyk was wrong and the salvage legitimate, the bank could offer very good rates on the contract. Full coverage for ten percent only sounds wise if there’s a chance the contract will be enforced…

Slowly, Cithrin felt her mind drifting out from under her, the wine and the distraction of contracts mixing with the hushing grass. She realized that her eyes had been closed for some time now, and without her effort. Half sleeping, she capped the wineskin, rolled over, and let her body sink in toward the trampled grass. Another few days to Sara-sur-Mar. Then the ship. And then Carse, and some way to con vince them all to take Pyk Usterhall, drop her down a well, and give the bank back to Cithrin.