The King's Blood

Cithrin

You need a bath,” Sandr said, prodding Charlit Soon with his toe. And then a moment later, “I need a bath.”

“I think we can say we’d all do well with baths,” Cary said. “And fresh food. And maybe a rainstorm.”

Cithrin squatted on the back of the cart, a bowl of stewed barley in her hand. She hadn’t come out of the hole until just after midday, and even after the walk to Yellow House, the sun seemed too bright. Twelve days in the darkness. So far.

“Well, the good news is we found your high priest,” Cary said. “The bad is that he’s holed up in the middle of an army and won’t let anyone come near him. I thought about passing him a letter, but I wasn’t sure you’d want that.”

Cithrin frowned. The truth was, she was of two minds. Several times in the last week, she’d have offered to cut off a toe if it meant a warm bed, a good meal, and five hours in a bathhouse. When Geder and Aster emerged from the hole, there would be no reason for her to be down in it with them, and she was coming to truly loathe that place. But when the time came, Geder would become Lord Regent Palliako again. Aster would be prince and king. Everything would change.

She’d been sent here to find out what she could about Antea in the face of its war with Asterilhold. Now she was hiding with two of the most important leaders, present and future, that the kingdom would have. What she’d learned was that Geder Palliako was a funny, somewhat awkward man who loved books of improbable history. That Aster hadn’t known how to spit for distance, and now—thanks to her—he did. She saw the affection between the pair of them, and the enthusiasms. And the almost physical shared sorrow that neither one of them acknowledged, or even recognized. When they rose out of the ground, they would leave her, and her chance to learn more of them both would vanish.

“I’ll talk to Geder about it,” she said, scooping up the last of the barley with two cupped fingers. “Anything else?”

“The usual human landscape of lies and folly,” Cary said. “Did you know that Geder commands the spirits of the dead, and that at night ghosts stalk the streets rooting out his enemies?”

“He hadn’t mentioned that,” Cithrin said. “Good to know. All right, then. If that’s all—”

Mikel grinned.

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact…”

Cithrin lifted her eyebrows.

“You always do that,” Charlit Soon said. “That’s exactly what I was talking about with A Tragedy of Tarsk. You always play the pause for effect.”

“Has an effect,” Smit said.

“Yeah,” Charlit Soon said, “it prolongs and annoys.” She tossed a pebble at Mikel.

“As a matter of fact,” Cithrin prompted.

“As a matter of fact,” Mikel said, somewhat abashed, “I found where your Paerin Clark’s been hiding. Went to ground in a guesthouse of Canl Daskellin’s, which was a pretty good idea since the inn you were staying in burned.”

“It burned?” Cithrin said.

“Fourth night after,” Cary said.

“My clothes were in there,” Cithrin said.

“Twelve people were in there,” Sandr said. “Two of them children.”

Cithrin considered Sandr. There had been a time not all that long ago when she’d very nearly taken him as a lover. From where she sat now, the wisdom of her decision not to glowed like a fire in the night.

“Yes, I am a small, petty woman,” she said, “and I mourn for the dead and the suffering, but I really wanted to get my own damn clothes back. Can you reach Paerin, or is he as guarded as the priest?”

“He’s not taking visitors he doesn’t know,” Mikel said.

“All right,” Cithrin said. “I’ll need something to write on.”

The company cipher was still clear in her mind, and the note was a brief one: Have access to Lord Regent and Prince Aster. What questions do I ask? Reply by same courier. She considered adding something that would say where she was, where Geder and Aster were, and she didn’t. If he wanted Geder and Aster, he could come to her.

It was one of the great and powerful lessons of finance. The key to wealth and power was simple enough to state and difficult to employ: be between things. Narinisle was a chilly island with barely enough arable land to support its own population and no particular resources to offer, but the currents of the Ocean Sea put it between Far Syramys and the rest of the continent. And so it was vastly wealthy. Now Cithrin had fallen into Narinisle’s position, and while it wouldn’t last, she could gain more the longer she remained in place.

“All right,” she said, handing the paper to Mikel. “I’ll come back as soon as I can for the reply.”

“How are things going underground?” Cary asked.

“Frightened and bored and ready to be done with this. But we let Aster sneak up to the mouth and look out at the daylight. It seems to help.”

“Good. When this is over, though, I hope the Lord Regent remembers who his friends are. I’m almost through all the stones the prince brought with him.”

“Really?”

“I could buy more with a ripe orange than with one of those pearls,” Cary said. “It’s already starvation time in some quarters. If this all doesn’t break soon, we’ll start seeing a lot more people dying. And they won’t be lords and nobles falling in glorious battle.”

When there was nothing more to be said, Cithrin pulled a sack over her shoulder with four fresh wineskins, a palmsized round of hard cheese, a bottle of water, some stale bread, and a double handful of dried cherries harvested at least a year before and hard as pebbles. She paused before she started the walk back, looking out over the Division.

The air was hazy, the far side of the span already a bit greyer than things closer to hand. Nothing was burning at the moment, but there was no reason to expect that would be true through the night, for instance.

She hadn’t been there for a half a season, but Camnipol had gone from the heart of an empire to a city of scars. It was in the scorch marks on the buildings and the faces of the men she passed in the streets, the empty market squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could play the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.

On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.

At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.

The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.

“Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.

Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.

“It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”

“The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”

“Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.

“It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”

“We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to stop.”

“The dragons, I mean,” Geder said. “Here, look.”

Cithrin came and sat beside them as Geder drew out the problem fresh. Morade was a dot in the center, his clutchmates were set one on either side. And three stones were the places Drakkis Stormcrow might be hiding: Firehold, Matter, and Rivercave. The puzzle gave each of the dragons rules on how they could move and in which order, and the puzzle was to find how Morade could check all three hiding places while blocking his clutch-mates.

“What if Stormcrow’s in the first one?” Cithrin asked.

“No, you don’t ever find him,” Geder said. “It’s only to look in all three places.”

“What if…” Aster reached for the little improvised board and tried a series of moves that didn’t work. Cithrin left them to it, opening the pack and putting everything out where she could locate it again by touch. The candle wasn’t going to last all the way to nightfall. Not that day or night meant much in the darkness.

They ate their dinner in darkness, and Aster crawled up through the dark tunnel to watch the sunset fade at the bottom of the ruined warehouse. Cithrin sat against a wall of stone and earth, her wineskin in her hand. Geder, invisible, was before her and to the right.

“Do you think they really all died?” she asked.

“Who? The dragons? Of course they did.”

“I went to the Grave of Dragons before I came out here. The man I was with was saying that Stormcrow would put pods of them to sleep, hide them away so that they would wake behind enemy lines and attack from the rear.”

“I’ve read about that,” Geder said. “They had ships too that would carry people into the sky. They had spines of steel and knife blades as long as a street. They’d fight dragons with them.”

“Did they ever win?”

“I don’t think so,” Geder said. “If they did, I never read about it.”

“When I was a girl, I dreamed about riding dragons. Having one as a friend who could carry me up and away from Vanai and everyone I knew. Everything. I had these elaborate stories about how it would obey me and let me do whatever I wanted. And then…” She laughed, shaking her head though no one could see it.

“What?” Geder asked.

“And then the dragon turned out to be money,” she said. “Coin and contract and lending at interest were what let me fly. Who would have thought that was what I meant by dreaming of dragons?”

“It makes sense,” Geder said. “I mean, it wasn’t really gold either. Dragons or coins or riding off with an army at your back and a crown on your head. It’s all the same. It’s power. You wanted power.”

Cithrin sat with the thought for a moment.

“Did you want power?” she asked.

“Yes,” Geder said. She heard him shifting his weight in the earth. “I wanted to see everyone who laughed at me suffer for it. I wanted every humiliation answered for.”

“And now that you have the power, you’re living in a ruin that stinks of cat piss and eating whatever an acting company can scrounge for you,” Cithrin said. “I’m not sure the plan is going well.”

“This isn’t a humiliation.”

“No?”

“No, you’re here. And anyway, it isn’t over. We won’t die here. The people who started this will answer for it.” He said it calmly and with confidence. He wasn’t bragging, just saying what he saw. “So. Who was this man you were with? When you saw the Grave?”

“Komme Medean’s son,” Cithrin said, and took another mouthful of wine. “It’s hard, I think, for Komme. He built the bank from a small concern that his grandfather had started, and he made it into this grand system that covers the world. A lot of it, anyway. And then he had a son who doesn’t understand anything.”

Geder’s laughter was warm and rich and oddly cruel, as if hearing her casually insulting Lauro pleased him.

“His daughter’s smart, though,” Cithrin said. “Paerin Clark’s wife. If Komme wants to see the bank last another generation, he’ll give it to her.”

A gentle scraping announced the return of the prince, and the scattering of stones fell to the ground.

“How was it out there?” Geder asked.

“There was light,” Aster said. “And I heard some men on the road. They sounded angry.”

“Did they see you?” Geder asked a moment before Cithrin could.

“Of course not,” Aster said, and she could hear the grin in his voice. “I’m the prince of ghosts. No one sees me.”

That night was cooler than usual, though she couldn’t tell any difference from the steady depth of Aster’s breath. The wine had blunted her anxiety, but she hadn’t drunk all she had to hand. One more skin lay on the ground just out of reach, and lying in the darkness beside Geder, she thought about reaching for it. But the fact that she wanted it was its own argument against.

The combination of enforced quiet and fear were, she knew, an invitation to overindulge. If she were honest with herself, she had probably already missed an opportunity somewhere in the dark nights with Geder and Aster simply by letting the wine blunt her. On the other hand, sleeplessness wasn’t a very good way to stay alert and focused either. Somewhere in the middle there had to be a balance, a way to calm her nerves without softening them. She didn’t want to grow old and find herself one of the wasted, bleary-eyed drunks living in the taprooms. The potential was in her, and so she lay in the darkness and didn’t reach for the wineskin.

Geder rolled against her, his arm falling across her belly, his face turned to the place between her shoulder and the floor. He was warm, at least, and her mouth didn’t smell better than his. The pattern of his breath told her that he was pretending to be asleep, and she let herself smile at that. It took him time to work up his courage, and she wasn’t at all surprised to feel his hand cupping her breast.

She closed her eyes, thinking through what she ought to do. No, more than that, what she wanted to do. Aster had already proved that he could sleep through hours of candle-light conversation, and even laughter. But what was the protocol about sex with a king? Or a Lord Regent, anyhow. She could refuse him, and her guess was that he would take the rejection gracefully and with apologies. Or at least that’s how she expected Geder to treat Cithrin. If he chose to react as Lord Regent Palliako, that was something else. It would be interesting to know which of his different roles he adopted, but the price of finding out might be unpleasant.

Almost as if at a distance, she noticed her own breath growing shallow, which she thought was odd. And, unfortunately, it removed the option of feigning sleep herself. Surely she couldn’t want him. Could she? She’d only had one lover before, and she remembered reacting this way to his touches, more or less. She shifted her mind, by conscious effort attending to her body. The weight and warmth she found was surprising. Geder’s hand had shifted, his fingers pressing tentatively against her belly, inching slowly down, and instead of awkwardness or discomfort, she mostly felt impatience that he was being so hesitant. Either he was doing this thing or he wasn’t; hovering awkwardly at the edge was undignified. What was he going to do? Pretend his hand had just landed by chance? Oops, how did that get there?

Her laugh was unintentional and deep in her throat. He went perfectly still, like one of the cats trying to sneak past in the dark, pausing in fear.

This was a bad idea. On every level, this was a terrible, awful, awkward, improbable impulse, and the right thing to do was turn to him and tell him so, and make whatever peace they could salvage from having come so very near to catastrophe together. She shifted, her betraying body moving to keep his hand against her. She opened her lips to speak, but somewhere along that path, she was distracted, because instead she kissed him.

Oh dear, she thought as his surprise faded and his mouth softened against hers. That didn’t go well at all.

His hands rose to her, and his breath was shuddering. He was trembling.

“I…” he whispered. “I haven’t…”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I have.”

Cithrin!”

The whisper was like paper tearing. She struggled up from a sleep so profound that she didn’t remember at first where she was or why opening her eyes didn’t have any effect.

“Geder?” she said.

“Cithrin, it’s me!”

Not Geder. Not Aster either.

“Hornet?”

“Do you have a candle?” the actor asked. “It’s near midday and I didn’t think to bring one.”

“No,” she said, sitting up. Oh God, where was her robe? She patted the dusty earth around her quietly, and Geder found her hand, pressing a familiar wad of cloth into it. “No, we used our last one yesterday tracking down Drakkis Stormcrow. Why are we whispering?”

She used the pause to pull the garment over her head.

“I don’t know, now you put it that way,” Hornet said. “Just seemed a whispering sort of place.”

“We talk here too,” Cithrin said.

“We do,” Geder agreed.

Aster chuckled from somewhere off to her left. She fit her arms into the sleeves. There. Decent now.

“I came to call you back,” Hornet said. “It’s over.”

“What’s over?” Geder asked.

“Battle of Camnipol,” Hornet said, rounding the vowels with an actor’s pride. “Dawson Kalliam’s in the gaol and his allies are falling over themselves looking for someone to blame or apologize to.”

“Kalliam surrendered?”

“Odderd Mastellin turned on him. Anyway. Thought you’d want to know, yes? Get yourselves out of here and back to the world.”

“Of course,” Geder said, and she heard the complexity in his voice. Pleasure and regret. The ending of something. “Back to the world.”