The King's Blood (42 page)

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.”

C

ithrin!”

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.”

Marcus

A

ll 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.