The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  “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.”

  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.”