The King's Blood

Marcus

All through the long night’s ride, Marcus had looked for his escape. He’d strained at the ropes wound around his wrists and ankles. He’d tried gnawing at the leather thong that held the cloth in his mouth. He’d rolled to the limit that the ring and chain allowed. When they came to a stop—the first birds singing up the dawn—his only achievements were that he’d made the bones of his wrist pop painfully and the blood from his broken nose was spread more or less evenly throughout the cart.

The voice that hailed the carter was familiar, but he didn’t place it until the man rose up beside him and smiled with a mouth overfilled with teeth.

“Yes, this is the man,” Capsen Gostermak said, shaking his head sadly. “Good morning, Captain Wester. I’m sorry that we have to meet again under these unpleasant circumstances.”

Even with his teeth, his smile managed to seem world-weary and amused. So at least his gaoler was a sophisticate. “There was supposed to be payment sent with him,” Capsen said.

“Ah, right,” the carter said. “Forgot.”

“Certain you did.”

Marcus heard a purse change hands, and then the pair of them hauled him out of the cart and marched him through the darkness, carrying him like a slaughtered pig. His shoulders lit up with pain and whatever he’d pulled out of place in his wrist snapped back. It hurt just as much going the other way. The dovecote was rough and unfinished stone, so when they leaned him against the wall, Capsen fumbling with a wide iron key, Marcus was able to scrape his cheek against it and dislodge the gag. He spat the wet, bloody cloth to the ground.

“I’ll double it,” he said. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it.”

Capsen chuckled ruefully.

“You’re already paying me quite handsomely, Captain,” he said. “I’m not a greedy man.”

The interior was less than twenty feet across. The doves fluttered, asking wordless questions with their coos. Capsen and the carter hauled him across to a wide iron bar set diagonally across a corner, the ends of the bar deep in each wall. The leather strap was chained to it, and Marcus left to kneel on the flagstone floor. The carter trundled away, and Capsen drew a thin, wicked knife. The doves fluttered as if concerned on Marcus’s behalf.

“I have some experience with this,” Capsen said, slicing through the ropes that bound Marcus’s legs. “Turn around. Thank you. There are two ways that this can go, and I will be paid the same in either case. You can have the admittedly limited freedom of the chain there.”

“Five feet of freedom,” Marcus growled.

“It’s a relative term, granted,” Capsen said, sawing through the ropes on Marcus’s wrists. “Or else I have a set of old manacles. They chafe and they were meant for Cinnae, so they’d likely be a bit tight on you. But if you insist, we can use them.”

“I’ll kill you,” Marcus said.

“And I’m not much of a fighter,” Capsen said. “So if you tried, I would have to act definitively. I don’t really know enough to manage simple restraint against someone as experienced as yourself. Mealtimes are first thing in the morning, a snack at midday, and another full meal just before sundown. I’ll empty the night pot once a day. The door will be locked from the outside always, and you’re too large to fit through the doves’ holes. If you make things unpleasant for me, I will make things unpleasant for you.”

“More unpleasant than being chained to the wall of a dovecote, you mean?”

“Unpleasant’s another relative term,” Capsen said. His smile seemed genuine.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I raise doves and write poems. Something has to pay the taxman.”

He stood back, and Marcus staggered to his feet. Everything from his knees down was numb as the dead.

“I’ll let you try to escape for a while if you’d like,” Capsen said. “Breakfast will be in an hour or so.”

For the next week, Marcus tried everything he could think of. He tried to twist out of the leather restraints. He tried to find how the chain was fastened, reaching behind himself until his shoulders and elbows ached. He ran from the wall, putting his full force behind each charge in hopes of breaking something loose, and then tried everything he’d done before again. One day he tried shouting for help. On the sixth day, he remembered something he’d heard about twisting rope out of cord, and turned himself head over foot, winding the chain tighter until it was a single, solid thing four times as thick as the original restraint and unable to move further. He used all his strength to force it on, to crack one link loose.

“Ooh,” Capsen said when he brought the evening meal that day. “Haven’t seen that one before. You’re very clever.”

“Thank you,” Marcus grunted. Unwinding himself took a long time, and when he had enough slack in the chain, his dinner was cold.

As the second week of his captivity began, Marcus found his anger and outrage fading. The world narrowed to a small, insoluble problem. It consumed him. Long after he’d convinced himself that the mechanism was inescapable, he kept trying, doing all the things he’d done before, expecting them to be the same as they had been, but open for a pleasant surprise. No matter what happened next, his first job was to escape.

The doves seemed to look at him as free entertainment, shifting on their perches and turning first one eye and then another. Capsen’s children would sometimes peek in at the doves’ holes high in the wall, stare at Marcus for a few minutes, and then flee, laughing. At night, Marcus took his revenge by tossing pebbles and small clods of dirt at the doves until they puffed up and turned reproachful backs.

At night, he had nightmares. That wasn’t new.

Dawn came in at the windows, a rising blue-white light. The doves commented to each other in a chorus of interrogative coos. The rattle of the lock came earlier than usual, and when the door swung open, it wasn’t Capsen who ducked in.

“Kit?”

“Marcus,” the actor said cheerfully. “I’ve been looking for you. I think I see now why you were so hard to find.”

“You have to get me out of here.”

“I do. But I wanted to speak with you first.”

Master Kit sat with his back to the rough stone wall. He looked older than Marcus remembered him. There was more white in his hair, and he looked thinner than he had even on the long caravan road from Vanai to Porte Oliva. Marcus pulled at his chains, setting them to rattle.

“I can talk to you without being strapped to a wall,” Marcus said. “We could skip to that part. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Do you know why we cut thumbs when signing contracts or treaties?” Kit asked, drawing a dagger from his belt. It was a simple huntsman’s blade, but sharp.

“Because that’s how you sign a contract,” Marcus said.

“But how did it get that way? Why blood and not… I don’t know. Tears. Spit. The story is that it’s been that way since the dragons, but it wasn’t always. That it began during the last war, when Morade forged his Righteous Servant and his clutch-mate built the Timzinae. Last race of humanity.”

“All right,” Marcus said. “I’ve never heard of a righteous servant apart from someone trying to convince me to buy a squire, but I’m going to assume you’re going somewhere with this?”

“I believe it was meant to show that neither party was tainted. If one or the other had been able to cheat, to force the other into agreement, the blood would show it.”

“And I’m sure you’re right. Kit? Unchain me now?”

“Come. Look at this.”

Kit pressed the blade to his thumb until a tiny drop of red appeared. The cut was tiny, no more than a pinprick, but the deepness of the blood made it seem almost black. No, there was a knot at the center of the drop, a tiny dark clot like a flake of scab that was forcing its way up through Kit’s skin.

The scab rolled to the side, tracking bright red behind it, and extended tiny legs.

“All right. That’s odd,” Marcus said.

“Don’t touch it. They bite. I find they’re poisonous in more senses than one.”

“Not to be rude, Kit, but you have spiders living in your blood?”

“I do. I have since I became a priest of the goddess many, many years ago. I believe we all carry the mark, though I haven’t tested it.” Kit caught the tiny spider and cracked it between his thumbnails. “I had a falling-out with my brothers. I’m afraid I lost my faith, and I found there was very little room for dissent. You may recall that before I left Porte Oliva word came of a new cult, drawn from the mountains east of the Keshet. It was mine. It was men who bear the same taint that I do. The war with Asterilhold and the unrest in Antea are, I think, the first, stumbling steps toward something much larger. Much worse.” Kit held up his bleeding thumb. “And that is why you cut thumbs on a contract. Because of men like me.”

Marcus ran his fingers through the beard that had grown during his captivity. His skin was crawling, but he kept his voice steady.

“This is the thing you were talking about. The evil that got loose in the world. It’s you?”

“It’s men like me. The taint in my blood is the sign of the goddess, but it isn’t her power. Her priesthood is given gifts by her. We are the masters of truth and of lies. I told you once that I could be very persuasive and that I was very difficult to lie to. It is this way with all of us. Tell me something I couldn’t know. Tell me true or lie. It doesn’t matter.”

“Kit, I don’t think that parlor tricks—”

“I don’t think you’ll find this a cunning man’s small magic,” Kit said.

“All right. Ah. I stole honey stones from my friend when I was a boy.”

“You did,” Kit said. “Try again.”

“The first battle I was in, I lost my sword.”

“You didn’t. That’s a lie. Try again.”

Marcus frowned. Something was shifting in the pit of his stomach, and it took him a moment to recognize it as fear.

“About a month ago, I found a silver coin in the street outside the counting house.”

“No.”

“It was copper.”

“Ah. Yes. So it was.”

Marcus let his breath out.

“That’s a good trick,” he said. “Could see how a man might be tempted to use that.”

“I don’t think it’s the worst thing I can do. I find the spiders can make me impossible to disbelieve. With time and repetition, I can make anyone believe anything. However ridiculous or absurd or dangerous. If it were in my interest, I could convince you that you were a god. Or that your family was still alive but hiding from you. Even if you knew better, even if your mind knew better, your heart would lead you wherever I told it to go. I can do that, and so can they.”

“And they’re in Antea?”

“And very close to the throne.”

Marcus sat for a moment, considering it. The corruption of kings and princes was nothing new. The twist-minded cunning man was a standard character in a thousand songs. And still, there was something about the tiny spider birthing itself out of Kit’s skin that made Marcus shudder.

“What do they want?”

Kit considered his thumb. The cut was already closed, neither blood nor spiders leaking out of his body. His voice was almost contemplative.

“When I was there, I was taught that the goddess would return justice to the world. We were to keep faith and wait for the day when she would send us a sign. A leader whose Righteous Servant we would be, and through him, the goddess would free the world from lies.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“Probably, yes, but I also decided it might not be true,” Kit said with a smile. “I was a very junior priest when I left. Many of the menial, small tasks fell to me. One was to be sure the temples were swept. I didn’t actually sweep. There was an old man who did that. I don’t even remember his name now. But I asked him one day whether he had swept, and he said yes. He had. And he was telling the truth. Do you see? I felt it in my blood, just the way I did with you. Only he was confused. He was mistaken. He thought he had. He was certain he had. He hadn’t.

“And so I fell from grace.”

“Over an unswept floor?”

“Over the proof that someone can be both certain and wrong. In my mind, I began to reserve judgment even on the revelations of the goddess. I cultivated the word probably. Was the temple swept? Yes, probably. But perhaps not. The goddess was eternal and just and immune to all lies, probably. We were her beloved and chosen, probably. But perhaps we weren’t. I became very aware of the division between truth and certainty. I began to doubt. And once I was on that path, there was no hiding it.

“One day the high priest came to me. He had found a remedy to my unfortunate predicament. I was to be taken to the goddess herself. Deep in the temple, through the secret ways, to her holy cavern. Only the high priest was ever allowed to commune with her directly, you see. But now I was to have that honor.”

The doves shifted, as if made uneasy by Kit’s voice.

“Didn’t like what you saw of her?”

“I ran,” Kit said. “He told me that no harm would come to me, and I believed him. I knew he was lying to me, and I believed him anyway. I told myself that no harm would come to me. That she wouldn’t harm her own. I had faith that what they were doing came out of love for me. As long as I had faith in her, she would not hurt me. And then, like a reflex in my mind, I thought probably. Probably she won’t. But she might. And as soon as that doubt was there, I saw how likely it was that I was being sacrificed. I found I wasn’t interested in finding religious completion. So I left.”

“I get the feeling it wasn’t as straightforward as that.” “It wasn’t. I’ve spent years, decades now, in the world we never saw. It is more complicated than the priests of the goddess taught. Truth and lies, doubt and certainty. I haven’t found them to be what I thought they were. I dislike certainty because it feels like truth, but it isn’t. And I think I have had some inkling what it is for a whole people to become certain.”

“And what’s that like, then?”

“It’s like pretending something, and then forgetting you were pretending. It’s falling into a dream. If justice is based on certainty, but certainty is not truth, atrocities become possible. We’re seeing the first of them now. More will come.”

“Probably,” Marcus said, and Kit’s laughter startled the birds into flight.

“Yes,” Kit said as a dozen small feathers floated down around them. “Probably. But it seems likely enough that I feel obligated to stop it. If I can.”

“And you’d do that by… ?”

“There are swords. Dragon-forged and permanently venomed. We had several at the temple, but I have found the location of another. I believe that with it, the goddess can be killed, her power broken. And so I am going to find it and go back to my home. And I will go to that sacred cavern at last.”

“That’s a stupid plan,” Marcus said. “It’s more likely to get you killed than anything else. How am I supposed to fit into this?”

“As my sword-bearer. The spiders in me dislike the blade. I don’t believe I could carry it all the way back myself. I think you could. Of all the men I’ve met in my years after the temple, I believe that you particularly could.”

Marcus shook his head.

“It all sounds a bit overheated and dramatic, Kit. The paired adventurers rushing to find the enchanted sword? Are you sure this isn’t an outline of some old play about defeating a demon queen?”

Kit chuckled.

“I have spent a certain amount of time onstage. My perspective on the world may come from standing on the boards. But I believe I’m right all the same,” he said. And then, gently: “Come with me. I need you.”

“You’ve got the wrong man, Kit. I’m not some sort of chosen one.”

“Yes you are. I’ve chosen you.”

The excitement—the joy—that woke in Marcus was like being pulled by a wave. It was what he’d wanted, what he’d been wordlessly longing for all the dire, grinding weeks in Porte Oliva. And now God was giving it to him on a gold plate. He dug in his heels.

“I can’t. Cithrin’s in Camnipol. I have to protect her.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Yes,” Marcus said.

Kit raised a finger. His smile was gentle, half amused and half sorrowful.

“Remember who you’re talking to. I know parlor tricks,” he said. “Do you think you can?”

Marcus looked down at his filthy hands. The nails were cracked and broken from scrabbling at his restraints. He didn’t have a blade or enough coin to buy a meal. Something thickened his throat.

“No.”

“Neither do I,” Kit said. “Neither does Yardem or that unpleasant notary the bank brought in. And I would be willing to wager that Cithrin doesn’t expect it of you. If she’s in need of rescue, I don’t think her strategy will be to wait meekly for her adoptive father to fix things.”

“She’s not my daughter. I don’t think of her that way.”

“If you say so,” Kit said.

“All right, that’s going to get annoying,” Marcus said.

“Marcus, it seems to me your life in Porte Oliva is over. Perhaps there’s a way to return to it, forge it into armor that doesn’t bite when you strap it on, but I don’t see how.”

“When Cithrin’s back. When she’s safe.”

“No one’s safe, Marcus. Not ever. We both know that. I believe you’re looking for a noble cause to die in,” Kit said. “As it happens, I have one. If we win, it will save Cithrin and countless other innocents besides. Or tell me you’d rather go back to enforcing loans, and I’ll leave you.”

His belly felt heavy, the truth of his situation pressing against him like being buried in sand. Still, he managed a smile.

“Unchain me before you go?”

Kit rose, put his hand on Marcus’s shoulder, and turned him around. It took only a few moments, and the leather strap that had bound Marcus for what seemed like a lifetime fell away. Marcus scratched at the skin where the restraints had been, reveling in the freedom of being in command of his own body. One of the doves hopped back in through its hole and took a place on its perch.

Kit stepped back. The silence between them was woven from light and dread. Marcus had put his life in this man’s hands more than once. He knew he could turn away now, go and exact vengeance on Yardem and try again to find Cithrin. The idea was still profoundly pleasant, and like all pleasant things, suspect. Kit waited.

It was idiocy. It was doomed from the start. Diving into ancient mysteries and solving the problems of the world in some grand, transforming gesture was something for the daydreams of children who didn’t know the world.

“These priests. Their goddess. They’re as bad as you make them out?”

“I believe they are.”

“And this magic sword of yours. Where is it supposed to be?”

“In a reliquary on the northern shore of Lyoneia.”

Marcus nodded.

“We’ll need a boat,” he said.