The King's Blood (26 page)

“Excuse me a moment,” Elisia said. “I think Corl called for me.”

“I’m sure he did, dear,” Clara said. “I’ll wait here.”

Clara took up her cup. The tea had grown cold, but she drank it anyway. Children were difficult because they became their own people. There had been a time when Elisia had run to Clara with every scrape and hurt feeling, but that girl was gone, and this young woman had taken her place, and Clara would never say aloud that she wasn’t sure of the exchange.

Clara watched the footman trot out from the house. He was a new boy. Messin or Mertin or something along that line. She would have to find out discreetly. He wore his uniform well, though, and his voice was gentle.

“My lady, there’s a gentleman here to see you. Sir Curtin Issandrian.”

“Really?” Clara said. “How very brave of him.”

“Shall I show him out, my lady?”

“Out to the garden or out to the street, do you mean?” Clara said, then waved the question away. “Take him to my husband’s library. I’ll speak with him there. God knows what he’d hear if we brought him out among these women.”

“Yes, my lady,” the boy—Meanan, that was it—said. Clara sat a minute longer to give the servants time to guide Issandrian to the right place, then stood, straightened her dress, and sailed into the house. Elisia wouldn’t be speaking to her again until she’d calmed down, and Sabiha was likely off crying somewhere private. Clara guessed a half hour’s audience wouldn’t leave too much opportunity for more unpleasantness.

Curtin Issandrian looked older with his hair cut short. Or perhaps it was that the last years bore down on him more heavily. There were lines around his mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there the last time he’d come to her house. A different world, that had been.

“Lord Issandrian,” she said, stepping into the room.

“Baroness Osterling,” he said, making a formal bow.

“I hope you weren’t coming to meet with my husband,” Clara said. “He’s off leading the army at the moment.”

“I think everyone’s aware of your good husband’s successes in the field,” Issandrian said. “No, I came to speak with you. To ask you to intercede.”

Clara sat on her divan, and Issandrian sat across from her, his hands clasped in front of him. He looked desperately tired.

“I know your husband and I have been at odds on several occasions,” he said. “But I have never doubted that he was an honorable man, and loyal to crown and kingdom.”

“Very much so,” Clara said.

“And your sons are some of the most promising young men at court. Vicarian is a model student and well spoken of. Barriath and Jorey now are both allied with Lord Skestinin. And, of course, Jorey is considered by many to be the regent’s most trusted friend.”

Issandrian swallowed. Clara folded her hands together.

“Is this about what happened to Feldin Maas?” she asked. “No one has accused you of treason, my lord. You aren’t accused as he was, and really, the court isn’t such a large place. We are all connected to one another somehow. Poor Phelia was my own cousin, and certainly no one thinks that we were involved in Maas’s treachery.”

“All respect,” Issandrian said. “You and Phelia Maas were instrumental in stopping Maas. And Lord Regent Palliako. I didn’t have the good fortune to be part of those events.”

“I’m not entirely sure that watching one’s cousin cut down by her husband qualifies as good fortune,” Clara said coolly.

“I apologize. That came out poorly. I only meant that your loyalty to the crown was demonstrated. Unquestionable. I didn’t know of the depths of Maas’s plot until after the fact. And a loyalist and traitor say all the same words at that point.”

It was a fair analysis, but not one that asked Clara to do or say anything in particular, so she kept silent and waited. The moment stretched.

“Sir Alan Klin was another of my compatriots at that time,” Issandrian said. “He serves under your lord husband now. I haven’t been asked to serve. I was wondering… I was wondering if you might enquire on my behalf why that is.”

“This is a very convenient time to be asking why you are not on the field,” Clara said. “It would have spoken better of you to ask when victory was less certain.”

“I have written to the Lord Regent several times,” Issandrian said. “I haven’t yet received the courtesy of a reply.”

“I see.”

“We have disagreed profoundly on some issues, but your husband and I have always been loyal to the Severed Throne,” Issandrian said. “I didn’t want to bring Asterilhold into the conflict any more than he courted Northcoast. But like him, I wasn’t working alone. And I…”

“And you see Sir Klin being given the chance to redeem his name while you are kept in Camnipol,” Clara said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I don’t take part in those decisions or discuss them with Dawson.”

“If you could ask… Just ask—”

“Sound out my husband on your behalf?” she asked with a smile. “Gather information and report it back to you? You can’t think that.”

Issandrian paled, and then chuckled ruefully.

“You make it sound more than it is,” he said.

“No, I only see the same thing from another angle,” she said. “I will tell my husband you came, and what we said. I will tell him you seemed sincere because you do. And if he wishes to converse with you about this, I won’t argue against it.”

“Baroness Osterling, I could ask nothing more.”

“You could ask,” she said. “But you couldn’t have it. And now I must ask that you go. I have family here.”

Issandrian practically sprang to his feet, his face and voice rich with apology.

“I hadn’t known that, my lady, or I wouldn’t have intruded. I owe you even greater thanks, it seems. If I can ever be of service to you, only let me know.”

“Lord Issandrian?” she said. He paused. “My husband hates you, but he respects you as well. It isn’t so bad a position to be in.”

Issandrian nodded soberly and made his exit. Clara walked back out toward the garden slowly. Her impression from Dawson’s letters was that Sir Klin wasn’t at all enjoying his time winning back his honor. And, in fact, that Palliako had gone out of his way to make the poor man’s time in the field as hellish as possible. She wondered whether she should write to Dawson about this or wait for his return.

In the garden, Elisia and the nurse were still by the pond, splashing and playing. Sabiha sat alone at the table. Clara’s pipe was in the girl’s hand.

“Where did you find it?” Clara asked, taking the little clay bowl and stem from the girl’s hand. There was already a hard wad of tobacco stuffed into it, ready for the fire.

“In your withdrawing room,” Sabiha said. “Just as you thought. I’ve been listening to your grandson. He’s a beautiful child.”

“He is. Takes after his mother that way. She was always a pretty child, even when she was growing half a hand a year and looked like a blade of grass come to life, she wore it well. And he doesn’t sleep any more than she did. I’ll tell you a secret. Watching your children struggle with the same things you did when they were babes is a grandmother’s revenge.”

Sabiha smiled. It wasn’t obvious that she’d been weeping. Only a little redness about the eyes and a tiny, fading blotchiness at the throat. The girl was lucky that way. Being able to hide tears was a gift. But now a fresh shining came to her. Clara pursed her lips.

“Sometimes,” Sabiha said, “and it isn’t often, but sometimes I think of how the world could have been if I hadn’t been Lord Skestinin’s daughter.”

“Ah, but you always were,” Clara said, trying to keep the girl from going down the path she was headed. The girl wouldn’t be turned.

“I know. It’s just there are freedoms women have when they aren’t what we are. There are struggles too, I understand that. But there are ways to shape a life even within those, and then maybe—”

“No,” Clara said.

Sabiha’s tears welled, but did not fall. Not yet.

“No,” Clara said again, more gently. “You can’t think of that child. You can’t even wish for him back. It isn’t fair to ask everyone else to forget and only you remember. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I miss him, though,” Sabiha whispered. “I can’t just stop missing him.”

“You can stop showing that you do. Jorey has risked a great deal to give you another life. Another beginning. If you didn’t want it, you should have refused him. Accepting him and also keeping hold of the past isn’t fair. And it isn’t wise.”

“I’m sorry,” Sabiha said, her voice thick. “He was my boy. I thought you would understand.”

“I do. And that’s why I’m saying this. Look up. Look at me. No,
at
me. Look
at
me. Yes.”

Sabiha swallowed, and Clara felt the beginnings of tears in her own eyes. There was a boy out there—a child—whose mother loved him enough to break her heart, and he would never know it. Perhaps it was fair to the girl. She’d at least made a decision, even if the punishment seemed too much for the lapse. But the child was blameless. He was blameless, and he would suffer, and Clara would do what she could to see that the estrangement between mother and son was permanent, and that Sabiha’s old scandals were all kept in the past where they belonged. A tear tracked down Sabiha’s cheek, and Clara’s matched it.

“Good,” Clara said. “Now smile.”

Cithrin

T

he last Dragon Emperor slept before her. Each jade scale was as wide as her open palm. The eyelids were slit open enough to show a thin sliver of bronze eye. The folded wings were as long as the spars of a roundship. Longer. Cithrin tried to imagine the statue coming to life. Moving. Speaking in the languages that had made the world.

On one hand, the bulk and beauty and implicit physical power of the thing was humbling. The claws could have ripped a building apart. The mouth, had it opened, would have fit a steer. But size alone didn’t define it. The sculptor had also managed to capture a sense of the intellect and rage and despair in the shape of the dragon’s eyes and the angle of its flanks. Morade, the mad emperor against whom his clutch-mates had rebelled. Morade, whom Drakkis Storm-crow schemed against. Morade, whose death was the emancipation of all the races of humanity.

At her side, Lauro Medean scratched his arm.

“They say that the dragons could sleep as long as stone when they wanted to,” he said. “It was part of the war. The dragons would bury themselves or put themselves in deep caves. Hidden. And then when the armies had their back or flank, the dragons would spring back to life. Come boiling up out of the ground. Slaughter everybody.”

Komme Medean’s son was a year older than her, but he acted much younger. He shared his father’s brown skin and dark hair, and when she looked carefully, she could see where the young man’s face would broaden, his jowls sink, and he would look even more like Komme. She wondered how old a man had to be before gout took him. He smiled at her.

“You want to go inside?”

“I’ve come a long way not to,” she said.

Coming to Carse, the thing she’d worried about least was the journey. Bandits, pirates, illness, wildcats. She knew of them all, and understood the risks of them better than most. Her work from childhood had been to understand risk. In a journey of a thousand miles taken by a hundred ships, about how many would be lost. In summer. In winter. Along the coast. Crossing the blue water to Far Syramys. How often caravans were killed or simply vanished. The actuarial tables were in her mind, and more than that the tools with which the tables were built. She could estimate chance better than a gambler, and so the journey held no terror.

The handing over of the reports had been worse. She knew that the branch was doing well, but not what would be well enough, or what the other branches were doing, or how her improvised branch in Porte Oliva affected the greater strategies of the holding company. It wasn’t risk that frightened her, but the inability to figure it, to place a number against it. To be unknown was worse than to be dangerous.

And of all the things that had kept her from sleep in the long weeks since she’d left Porte Oliva, the worst was this: how would she manage to stay long enough to win over the holding company? She had come to do a job, and she didn’t know how she would insinuate herself into the day-to-day life of the business well enough to keep them from sending her back.

When the occasion came, it hadn’t been a problem at all. She was a figurehead in Porte Oliva, a curiosity in Carse, and Komme Medean was more than happy to have her where she wasn’t even a social presence in the company. Oddly, she didn’t resent it. She had the feeling—true or not—that Komme Medean was willing to play this game with her. Willing to see if she could charm and impress him. And that along the way, he would throw obstacles in her path.

His son, for example.

As they walked past the great jade statue, the Grave of Dragons opened out before them. Cut down into the living earth, the tiers of the grave were wider than streets, curving and turning like the drawing of a riverbed, but too perfect to have been cut by any real water. The stone flowed out for over a mile, ten tiers deep, and at each level, the tombs.

The bodies, if they had ever really been there, were gone centuries ago. But the dragon’s jade altars still showed the clawmarks of the dead. Most had three great toes at the front and one in the rear, but some had only two in the front. Some two in front, and two in back. In the deepest tomb, a single massive dragon’s footprint sank into the ground almost as deep as Cithrin’s waist. Mineralized lines on the sides showed where rain had collected in it as if in a pond, and dried away. It was clean and empty now.

“Go ahead if you want,” Lauro Medean said. “It’s all right. Everyone does.”

Cithrin smiled, looked around, and then lowered herself into the footprint and lay down, stretching her arms above her. Her feet and fingertips couldn’t quite touch the edges at the same time. She imagined the dragon floating through the sky above her, blotting out the sun. Once, it had. Once, they had flown in this air, above these cliffs. The thought took her breath away.