The King's Blood

Clara

The letter from Osterling Fells was written in a poor hand, the letters awkward as kittens and the spelling approximate at best. There were scribes at the holding, and at least one in the township nearest it. Vincen Coe could have easily had some more practiced hand aid him, but he had not. The text itself was innocuous—the progress of the kennels, the watering tanks to provide for the hunting pack, the number of pups whelped in the spring—and she couldn’t precisely object to his having made the report. It was like a light, unnecessary touch on the hand. Like the other letters from him, Clara wouldn’t respond. Sooner or later, the boy would recover from whatever madness had fixed his mind upon her. He would find some more appropriate infatuation, and the letters would stop. She put this one down again for the hundredth time, it seemed, and resumed her uneasy pacing.

The night hadn’t let her sit still, not even for handwork. The revel had begun in the morning and was set to travel through until the middle part of the night. And with it, something darker. She let herself hope that whatever her husband had in mind, it would fall apart at the last moment. That he would come home annoyed and disappointed, but without anything dramatic having taken place. She told herself it could be like that. That the world tomorrow could look very much like it had yesterday.

She plucked at her sleeves and chewed on the stem of her pipe, teeth tapping against the hard clay. Dawson had lived all his life with the politics of court and the tactics of war. He would be fine. Whatever needed doing, he would do, and they would survive it and the family would, and it would all end well. She fought to believe it. She struggled and she failed.

The first sound to herald the chaos was a single horse running hard into the courtyard. The second was the yelp of the footmen. Dread pulled her toward the main doors almost against her will. When they burst open, Dawson stumbled through on the arm of the door slave. Her husband’s sword was in his hand, and blood soaked his right arm and side. His hunting dogs circled the pair, their ears back and faces rich with concern. She must have made a sound, because he looked up at her sharply.

“Arm the house,” he said between gasps.

The fear that had been welling up in her broke, flooding her with ice. She didn’t know yet what the worst was, but she had no doubt it had happened. She grew calm. She walked to her husband, pushing the dogs aside, and put a supporting shoulder under his arm.

“You heard my lord’s order,” she said to the door slave. “Spread the word. All doors and gates are to be locked immediately. Shutter the windows. Gather the servants and be ready to defend the house. When that’s done, find Jorey and send him to the kitchens.”

“My lady,” the door slave said, and gave Dawson over to her.

With every step Dawson winced, but he didn’t slow. The dogs followed them anxiously. When they reached the kitchens, Dawson lay on the wide oak preparation table and squeezed his eyes closed. As Clara went to the pantry, her head cook came into the room and stopped.

“You aren’t armed,” Clara noted as she took cooking wine and honey from the pantry shelves.

“No, ma’am,” the old cook said.

“You should be. I’ll take care of this. You get your people and see that they’re ready to fight if the need comes.”

“It will,” Dawson said. “The need is coming.”

The cook scurried away, possibly to find a weapon or possibly to flee the mansion. Clara put the odds about even. At the table, she used a carving knife to slit his shirt, pulling it away from the skin with a wet sound that horrified her. A rag hung from a peg at the table’s end, and she wiped away the worst of the gore with it. There were two cuts, one along his ribs just under his left breast, the other above his collarbone. Neither were deep, but both bled freely. She opened the wine bottle, pulling the cork with her teeth.

“They knew,” Dawson said. “Not the details, but they knew something was planned. They were ready for us.”

“Stop talking,” she said. “This will hurt.”

She poured the wine into the cut on his side, and Dawson arched back, sucking in his breath. He did not scream. She did the same again with the other cut. His breath grew ragged. With his shirt gone and some, at least, of the blood washed away, she could see a dozen angry red welts all down his right side and out along his arm. They didn’t bleed, but the skin around them was hot to the touch and tight as a drum.

“What happened here?” she asked as she prepared to honey the wounds. “Spiders,” Dawson said. “That mad bastard cultist must have been carrying a sack of them under his robes. And soon as I cut him, they came boiling out.”

“You cut him,” she said. It was neither a question nor a statement, but something between.

“If I’d meant to, he’d be dead,” Dawson said as she slathered the honey over the lower of his cuts and pressed her cloth to it. “I was trying for Palliako.”

With her free hand, Clara pressed palm to mouth, only realizing after that she’d bloodied her own face. Dawson drew her hand away from the cut and pressed down on it himself. It was still bleeding, though not quite as badly.

“You,” she began, then tried again. “You tried to slaughter the Lord Regent? That’s what this was all about?”

“Of course it was. Palliako didn’t give me an option. I did and Lord Bannien and Alan Klin and a few others besides. This wasn’t done alone or for glory. We’re fighting to save the throne from those foreign bastards Palliako’s wedded himself to. Only somehow they knew we were coming. The guards were on alert. It should never have been me holding the blade to start with, but they couldn’t reach the high table. Not in time.”

Clara’s heart darkened. If there was a way to save this, to make it right again, she didn’t know it. She could only hope that they would win, and even that was thin comfort.

“What happened to him? Does Palliako still live?”

“I don’t know. When I tried to take him, the bastard priest got in my way, and then the personal guard was at my heels. One of the others may have caught him, but I didn’t. Stop. Enough.”

He sat up. The cuts still bled, though less freely. Wine stained his skin more deeply than the film of drying blood, and the honey shined on him. He was old. The hair on his chest was more grey than black now, and his forehead was high where the hairline had begun to retreat. His sword was still in his hand. She wondered if she had anything to salve a spider’s bite, and what sort of spiders a priest carried with him into an ambush.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, proud of herself that the question came out sounding like matter of planning and not a cry of despair.

“We do what we have to,” Dawson said. “We win. There are forces on our side. Allies. We have to gather them and defend ourselves. We have to find Aster.”

“Find him? He’s lost?”

“He is. Once it was done, we were going to throw down our blades right there and surrender to him, but…”

“But now the palaces are thick with violence, and the prince, who was in the middle of it all, is missing,” Clara said. “God. Dawson, how could you have done this?”

“It’s my duty. And however badly it’s played out, the risk was worth taking,” he said, his expression closing. He shifted to the edge of the table and let himself down. “I’ll want something to wrap this with. And a fresh shirt.”

“Stay here,” Clara said. “I’ll bring them.”

She walked through her own house like it was an unknown country. The papered walls, the glowing oil lamps, the rich tapestries that hung from the walls. All of it had taken on the too-sharp sense of something from dreams. The servants were gone, and with no one to help her, she chose two shirts from Dawson’s wardrobe. One was pale yellow to shred and use as bandages. The other was a dark blue that neared black so that when the wounds wept, the blood wouldn’t show so clearly. Outside the bedroom window, she saw three men she knew—the cook’s boy, the footman with the unfortunate ears, and the farrier’s assistant. They stood clumped together like birds in the cold despite the warm night air. They held blades and hammers, pretending with their postures to know the use of them. Clara closed the shutter before she walked away.

Jorey was in the kitchen when she returned to it. His hair was in disarray, the leathers he’d worn to war hung halflaced from his shoulders. He’d started to affect a beard, but it was still only stubble; a shadow across his cheeks no light dispelled. As she stepped in, her son looked up at her. The distance in his eyes was terrible to see.

“Help me bind him up,” Clara said, forcing a smile into the words. “Your father’s a dear man and always has been, but I won’t have him leaking on the floors.”

Dawson chuckled if Jorey didn’t. They stood at the wide table and tore the pale shirt into strips, the cloth parting under her fingers, threads ripping apart.

“Bannien’s got the most men,” Dawson said, carrying on a conversation they’d already begun, “but his estate’s not defensible. Too open, too many low hedges a man could vault. Klin’s isn’t as good as Mastellin’s, but until we know how word of this leaked, we can’t trust the men I’ve trusted.”

“But you can trust Klin?”

“He wouldn’t take Palliako’s side if he was on fire and Geder had the only water in the world. Strange as it is, Klin’s the only man I feel certain I can rely on now.”

She prodded at Dawson’s elbow to make him lift it, then laid the strips of pale cloth against his injured skin. Her fingers seemed to know what to do without her direction. Just as well, since her mind was a whirlwind and no two thoughts within it connecting to each other. When she needed to get around back to tie the bandaging down, Jorey held the cloth for her, and she had the sudden, powerful memory of helping her sister wash their father’s body for burial. The thickness in her throat was as unwelcome as undeniable.

“I’ll go to him,” Jorey said. “If you think it’s best.”

“No,” Dawson said. “Send a runner. You take Sabiha and your mother. Get them to safety.”

“And what makes you think I would consent to go anywhere?” Clara asked tartly. “Last I saw, this was still my home.”

The last of the bandages in place, she reached for the darker shirt. Dawson caught her hand. She couldn’t say which of them was trembling.

“If you stay, Jorey will,” Dawson said, “and if he does, the girl will too. I’m not defeated, but I can’t both fight this battle and keep eyes on all of you. If you’re all here, I will keep eyes on you. Won’t be able to stop.”

“You would have to,” Clara began, and the words choked her. She swallowed. “You would have to believe that there’s someplace safer than here.”

“Jorey will take you out of the city. And when this is done, he will bring you back.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked, but they both knew it wasn’t a question he could answer. She kissed him sharply on the forehead: love and anger. “Let me gather a few things. Jorey, get your wife.”

Horses and carriages would have been fastest, but they would also have called the most attention to them. Instead Clara and Sabiha wore dark cloaks with the hoods drawn up. Jorey walked in front wearing his leather and a sword at his side. Uncharitably, she wished now that she hadn’t sent Vincen Coe away. An additional sword either here with her or at the mansion guarding Dawson’s back would have been welcome. In the north, fires were burning.

The city was transformed. The wide streets seemed dangerous, too open and leaving someone too easily seen. The shadows called to Clara, promising protection in their obscuring darkness. From the way that Sabiha walked close to her, she guessed the girl felt the same. These dark buildings and blackcobbled streets weren’t the city they’d lived in, but someplace unknown, unsafe, and malign wearing a mask of their home.

They reached the square where in daylight farmers would sell their goods to the servants of the great houses on the western side of the Division. The smell of rotting leaves in the gutters marked where the last day’s fallen greens had been bruised into muck. Across the way, a crowd of men strode into the square, torches held high above their head. Without so much as a word, Clara and Jorey stepped into the alcove of a little shop, pulling Sabiha along after them. The torchlight seemed too bright; it hurt to look at too closely. The men were shouting to each other, rough voices drunk with violence and wine. They were going back the way Clara had just come. Toward the mansion and Dawson. Clara squinted, trying to make out the colors the men wore, trying to guess whether these were allies come to reinforce the position or enemies ready to kill and loot and burn. She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t dare go closer.

When the last of them had passed, Jorey snuck out and Clara and Sabiha followed. Sabiha took Clara’s hand and wouldn’t let it go. Clara pulled the girl close. Somewhere to their right, a woman was screaming. If the city guard was in the street tonight, Clara saw no sign of them. The woman stopped suddenly, and Clara could only tell herself that someone had come to her aid; she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

Halfway to the western gate, they came to a barricade in the street. Tables, chairs, crates, and a wide overturned cart. There were men on both sides of the obstruction. She couldn’t tell if it was meant to stop people like her trying to escape to the countryside or to block soldiers and thugs coming into the city. The men wore no uniforms. The pennants of no houses flew. If war was a violence conducted with rules and traditions on a field of honor, then this was not war, but something worse.

“What do we do?” Clara asked in a whisper.

“Come with me,” Jorey said.

The back alley was filthy, but Clara couldn’t bring her self to care. If the hem of her-cloak dragged through the gore of a slaughterhouse, it would only be what the night called for. Etiquette and delicate sensibilities had their place, but it was not here. Jorey was craning his neck, looking up it seemed at the night sky as if the stars might sweep down to carry them away. His small grunt of pleasure caught her attention.

“What?” she asked.

“That roof,” he said, pointing at a single-storied taphouse with its lights doused and its shutters locked. “If I lift you up, can you get onto it?”

Clara looked at the structure. It had been decades since she’d been a little girl climbing where she wasn’t wanted. And even then it had for the most part been trees.

“I can try,” she said.

“Good,” Jorey said.

They lifted Sabiha up first, and then Jorey lifted Clara into Sabiha’s waiting hands. He scrambled up last. Gesturing in silence, he led them along the rooftop to an alcove where a rough wooden ladder hid in the darkness.

“If you go up here,” Jorey whispered, “there’s a place where we can lay the ladder across the alleyway and get past that barricade. Providing they don’t look up.”

“I am beginning to think I raised you poorly,” Clara said, but she took herself up the ladder. From the top of the second story, the street looked very far away. The men at the barricade laughed with each other, joking in a way that made the fear and tension in them clearer than sunlight. Sabiha clambered up at Clara’s side while Jorey knelt and began lifting the ladder one rung at a time.

Clara looked out over the city. Her city. There were more columns of smoke, but the one nearest the Kingspire was beginning to fade. Either someone had organized a fire team or the building set alight was exhausted of everything but stone. Far away, the walls of the city were dotted with torches and the low half moon seemed about to rest its head on the western gate.

The western gate.

“Stop,” Clara said. “You can put the ladder back down.”

“No, it will work,” Jorey said. “I know it doesn’t seem sturdy, but I’ve done this before. It was a bet we used to make when I was—”

“The gates are shut,” Clara said. “Someone’s sealed the city.”

Jorey appeared at her side. The wall of the city wasn’t so far from them. In daylight and sanity, she could have walked from the street below them to the huge gates in only a few minutes. Even in the darkness, there was no question that the wide bronze doors had been closed. Closed and likely dropped from their hinges, as they would be in time of war.

“We’re trapped,” Sabiha whispered.

“We are,” Clara agreed.