The King's Blood (46 page)

“I don’t think he does,” Aster said.

Geder laughed.

“I think you’re right. I’ll do what needs doing. And I won’t die. I promise.”

Geder wondered whether this was what it was to have a son. He didn’t think so. It was too much like having a friend, and father and sons were something—many things—but not that. Perhaps it was that they both knew what it was to lose someone important. Or that they were the two men in Antea so wrapped in power and privilege that it isolated them.

“What are you going to do?” Aster asked.

“I’ll see him punished,” Geder said. “I’ll see all of it stopped. Whoever it is. And I’ll see that this never happens again. Agreed?”

Aster considered silently for a moment, then nodded. Geder put his book on the table, stood, and blew the first candle out. Aster joined him, snuffing each wick until darkness and a breath of smoke was all that was left of the library.

“So,” Geder said as they walked out, man and boy side by side, together but not touching, “I know nothing would be possible so long as I’m Lord Regent. But once I’m done with my watch and the throne’s yours? How bad do you think the scandal would be if I married a banker?”

Cithrin

C

ithrin walked through the charred ruins of the inn. It was dreamlike. Strange. She’d stood there not a month before and heard Smit’s voice again. When she had, the stone walls of the inn had been as strong and permanent as mountains. Now soot stained them, and the roof had fallen in where the supporting timbers had burned out. It seemed unlikely that this was the same place. Or even the same city. Perhaps it wasn’t.

“I went through it all as best I could, Magistra,” the woman said. She was Firstblood, thicker than Cithrin. Darkerskinned with ruddy cheeks and dark smudges of exhaustion and loss under her eyes. “I found what I could, but it was little. They took a good bit before they burned it, and the fire took the rest, most part.”

“Show me,” Cithrin said.

The little courtyard was laid out in squares now. A bit over two dozen of them. At a guess, they were the men and women who’d paid for the woman’s hospitality and been overtaken. The woman stopped at a square of blackened cloth.

“This was in about the right place, Magistra,” she said. “It was in the corner away from the worst of it. There’s a few things might be worth keeping.”

Cithrin squatted down. Everything smelled of smoke and ash. Yes, here was the green dress she’d brought from Carse. Here was a thin silver necklace, the links fused. If this had been in the corner farthest from the fire, it had still been a kiln. The notebook she’d kept had burned along all its edges, but the center pages had only yellowed and curled. When she flipped through them, the reek of smoke was over-whelming. She tossed it aside. The blue silk cloak, ruined. The wool, ruined. A ring of gold and gems that wasn’t hers she put aside for the innkeeper to either find its right finger or keep for herself.

Moving the ruined scraps of cloth, her fingers touched something hard and solid as stone. She pulled the dragon’s tooth free. It was perfectly white. The complicated roots looked like a sculpture of water. Amid all the human destruction, the dragon’s tooth stood untouched. She wasn’t sure whether she found the idea reassuring or eerie, but either way, the tooth was hers. She slipped it into her pocket.

Another man came, and the innkeeper went to speak with him. Not another guest of the ruined house, but a tax assessor come to negotiate. The small people might suffer their tragedies, but the taxmen had bought the rights to collect, and if they couldn’t make back the contract, their own children would go wanting. And so it all went on, endless and merciless and unyielding.

Cithrin stepped out to the street. The necklace she could sell as silver. The tooth was as uselessly beautiful as it had ever been. Everything else was a loss.

The tailor’s shop was across a wide courtyard from the bathhouse where Cithrin had spent a full day after rising up out of the bolt-hole. She’d washed in the wide copper tubs, scrubbing her hair until it stood wide and unruly as a dandelion puff. She’d scraped herself with the wooden slats until her skin was pink as a newborn mouse. And still, when she’d walked out to the street, she’d felt the grit at her scalp and smelled the cat piss on her skin. In the end, she’d been forced to conclude it was all an illusion of habit, and she’d best just pour on the rosewater and wait for the feeling to fade. But in leaving, she’d seen the tailor’s and made note of it.

Part of what made the place stand out was that the proprietor was Dartinae. Camnipol was a Firstblood city, and while there were a few people here and there of many of the races, to see a Dartinae with a business of his own was strange enough to make Cithrin well inclined toward him even before she went in.

“Yes, miss,” he said as she stepped in from the street. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I am here from Porte Oliva, and my entire wardrobe has been reduced to ash. I’m going to need several pieces and I’m in a bit of a rush.”

It was, she knew, the unsubtle merchant signal that she was willing to pay a little more coin if he was willing to give her a little more of his attention. It worked as she knew it would. He took her measurements with string and wax, making small notations in a system she’d never seen, and then bringing out samples of his work. She commissioned two dresses formal enough to stand before a king, or in this case Lord Regent. It was odd to think of dressing formally to attend Geder, but that was the world now. They weren’t living like beggars and refugees, so she couldn’t dress like one.

She’d also need something warm and sturdy for the journey back to Carse, but for those she’d check the rag shops and talk with Cary about where the company was getting its costumes. Maybe she could even commission something very simple from Hornet. He had a decent eye as a costumer, and despite the riches from Aster’s clothes, a theater company was never so well off that it would turn away the coin.

“And perhaps a cloak, miss?” the Dartinae said, holding up what seemed a massive expanse of sewn black leather. “It is the fashion.”

On whim, she tried it. It felt like she was swimming in a night-black sea and looked like she was being eaten by shadows. She shook her head and handed it back.

“Just the others, thank you.”

“You’re sure?” The tailor’s eyes glowed a bit brighter. “It is the fashion.”

When she found her way back to Lord Daskellin’s mansion, Paerin Clark was waiting with an odd expression. The baron had been kind enough to offer lodging to the members of the Medean bank in no small part because of the extraordinary circumstances and his role in bringing them to the city. The understood message being that their welcome shouldn’t be taken as precedent. Daskellin was, after all, a Baron of Antea. They might break bread in a peasant dining room in Carse, but this was Camnipol and his home. There were standards and boundaries. For instance, she went in by the side doors.

She walked up the wide stone stairs, her eyebrows raised in query. Paerin’s smile was calm, disarming, and so practiced that she was sure he was unaware of it.

“I’ve just come from meeting with the Lord Regent,” he said, opening the door for her.

“Yes?”

“He is in an astoundingly companionable frame of mind,” Paerin said. “He suggested that the Medean bank might consider opening a branch in Camnipol.”

“Really,” she said, stepping into the hallway. The rooms they’d been given were the largest in the servants’ quarters, and reaching them meant walking through the kitchen. “That doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so. But I also wouldn’t have expected to be asked. And not only that, but he seemed very reluctant to have me leave. We talked for easily twice the time allotted for the audience. I almost had the sense he was working from some other agenda.”

Cithrin laughed low in her throat.

“And what sort of agenda would that be?” she asked.

“That was what I wanted to ask you. You’ve become the bank expert of Geder Palliako. Why would he want a branch of the bank?”

Cithrin paused by a thin black doorway so unobtrusive it apologized for itself. Outside the servants’ door, the voices of young women of the court floated like birdsong, beautiful and rich and essentially empty of meaning.

“I can’t say for certain,” she said, “but I would guess that he was hoping I might be set to watch over it.”

“Really now,” Paerin Clark said. “And you wouldn’t have put that thought in his mind, would you? I only ask because your interest in running a branch is fairly well known.”

“I don’t want just any branch,” Cithrin said. “I want mine. If you offered me Camnipol… well, I might accept, but you’d have to pay me a great deal more.”

“His idea, then.”

“His.”

“That’s quite interesting too. Is there anything you’d like to add to your official report?”

“No,” Cithrin said. “There isn’t.”

“Where are your loyalties?” he asked. His tone of voice was precisely the same, but she could sense that the question was deeper, and she thought for a long moment before she answered.

“I don’t know. I think we’re in the process of finding that out, you and I. Don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “Oh. And there’s a letter come from dare I call it your branch. From a Yardem Hane? Nothing critical I don’t think. Only that Captain Wester resigned. This Hane person was his second, and he’s stepped in the role.”

“What?”

He looked up at her, concern in his eyes.

“Is that a problem?”

Cithrin felt shocked and hollowed. He wouldn’t be there when she went back. She tested the thought and found it

implausible. Of course Marcus would be there. He was
always
there. Something must have happened, but she couldn’t think what it would be, of what could make it all right.

“Not a problem,” she said. “Only a surprise.”

I

might be able to get you some interest from Geder,” Cithrin said. “Having the patronage of the Lord Regent could make you all quite fashionable.”

“You’re moving,” Hornet said around a mouthful of pins. “Stop moving.”

“I’d be quite happy for whatever patronage we could find,” Cary said, lifting one of the mock swords and considering it. “But I’m not sure how much the Lord Regent is going to want to remember his time with the company.”

“Don’t know about that,” Sandr said. “It was an adventure, wasn’t it? It isn’t like it’s a thing everyone in court will have done.”

“I don’t think court grandees score points off each other by bragging on who’s lived in the most squalid filth,” Cary said. “Really, that hole reeked.”

“I suppose it did,” Cithrin said. “Well, if you don’t make yourselves the favorite company of the noble classes of Camnipol, then what? Come back south?”

“Anyplace that’s not so hot the stones sweat would be fine with me,” Sandr said.

“Oh, don’t bother leaving for that,” Smit said. “This heat’s about to break. You can smell it, if you know how.”

Sandr snorted and rolled his eyes.

“You can’t call the weather,” he said.

“Sure I can,” Smit said.

“No you can’t. You always say the same thing. It’s always that there’s a storm coming. You’ll go on for weeks that way.” Sandr shifted his face, lengthening his jaw and pulling down in the eyes somehow that Cithrin didn’t entirely understand. The imitation was so good, he seemed like Smit’s brother. When he spoke, the voice was Smit’s. “Storm’s coming. Mark me, storm’s coming.”

“And I’m always right,” Smit said. “Sometimes it just takes a little longer for it to get here.”

“But you could just as well say snow’s coming and claim every winter proved you right.”

“I would be,” Smit said. “And besides that, storm’s coming.” Cary turned, catching Cithrin’s eye. They smiled at each other. This was Cary’s family, and she loved it. Cithrin loved it too, though it wasn’t hers. They were friends, some of them dear, but her home wasn’t in the cart or on the stage or sleeping in the hayloft above some new stable. Hers was in

the counting house and the café.

“All right,” Hornet said. “Let me throw some stitches on that, and you’ll have a nice simple traveler’s dress, perfect for any occasion involving mud, mules, and mischief. And I’ve put in a little pocket here you can hide a knife in case the caravan master sets his aim for your virtue.”

“I will fear no caravan master,” Cithrin said in an artificial voice, the parody of stagecraft. Her bow was florid and unlikely to match. “My eternal thanks.”

Hornet returned the gesture in kind, perfectly, and they both laughed.

Cithrin knew the rule from the first time she’d traveled with the company, back when Master Kit had been its control: run against the stream. In a city struck by plague, comedy. In a rich city in prosperous times, tragedy. The power of the stories they told was in the distance they took the people standing in the audience. Tonight, they were doing The Dog Chaser’s Tale, which was about as low and bawdy a farce as Cithrin had ever seen. They did it well. Sandr’s delivery of the lines had, she was sorry to admit, a certain genius to them. But her attention wasn’t on the stage, but the men and women looking up at it.

When Smit leaped to the stage with the enormous leather phallus bulging out of his costume, the crowd roared and pointed. Tears streamed down their cheeks. They were hungry for this, Cithrin thought. They were desperate for pleasure, joy, laughter. And of course they were. They’d faced a conspiracy by their neighboring kingdom, the death of their king, war, and now a vicious battle on their own streets. They had earned their desires.

But she couldn’t look away. A boy barely old enough to shave was laughing so hard he rolled back on the stone-paved ground. On the stage, Charlit Soon pretended to be a cunning man changing his shape into a woman and then being wooed by another man, and an ancient-looking tooth-less woman slapped her knees and roared. It was too much. The laughter bordered on the grotesque. Cithrin sat on the side of the crowd, stage and audience equally in her view.