The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  There was no time to rest, and Clara didn’t know how they managed it. How her husband managed it.

  For her, the short days and long nights were the time of year when she could rest. Recuperate. For weeks before and after Longest Night, Clara slept long and deep. She spent her days sitting before a fire, her fingers busy with their embroidering and her mind at rest. The stillness of winter was her refuge, and the thought of a year without it inspired the same dread as contemplating a night without sleep. She was an older woman now, the grey in her hair no longer sparse enough to bother plucking out. Her daughter was married and with a child of her own. But even when she’d been young, Clara had known that winter was her season away from the world.

  And spring was her return to it.

  “There have always been religious cults,” she said. “Lady Ternigan was brought up in the Avish mysteries, and it never seemed to do her any particular harm.”

  “I’m just concerned that there won’t be any silver left for the real priests,” Lady Casta Kiriellin, Duchess of Lachloren, said. “Your son’s in training for the priesthood, isn’t he, Clara?”

  “Vicarian,” Clara agreed. “But he’s always said there are as many ways to worship as there are worshippers. I’m sure if something new comes along, he’s quite prepared to learn those rites as well.”

  Lady Joen Mallian, the youngest of the group, leaned forward. Her skin was pale as daisies and showed every drop of blood in her cheeks. There was a vicious rumor that she had a Cinnae grandmother.

  “I’ve heard,” she whispered, “that the Avish mysteries make you drink your own piss.”

  “The way Lady Ternigan’s tea tastes, I shouldn’t doubt it,” Casta Kiriellin said, and they all laughed. Even Clara. It was uncalled for and cruel, but Issa Ternigan did serve the strangest teas.

  The party was seven strong, each of them dressed in new clothes with bright dyes. Clara always thought of these days as a sort of religious rite. The twittering and gossip and bright colors worn as if by mimicking the glory of flowers they might call forth the buds. The gardens belonged to Sara Kop, Dowager Duchess of Anes, who sat at the head of the table in a dress of glowing white lace as pure as the old woman’s hair. She’d been deaf as a stone for years and never spoke, but she smiled often and seemed to take pleasure in the company.

  “Clara, dear,” Lady Kiriellin said, “I’ve heard the most unlikely rumor. Someone’s said your youngest is pitching woo at Sabiha Skestinin. That can’t be right, can it?”

  Clara took a long sip from her teacup before she answered.

  “Jorey has taken a formal introduction,” she said. “I’m meeting the girl this afternoon, though of course that’s all form and etiquette. I’ve known her peripherally since she was just walking. I can’t fathom why we put ourselves through all the fuss of ritual to pretend to meet someone we already know quite well, especially as Dawson’s the one she’ll really need to win over. But tradition is tradition, isn’t it?”

  She smiled and lifted her head, then waited. If anyone was going to bring up the girl’s past, this would be the moment. But there were only polite smiles and covert glances. Jorey’s unfortunate connection to the girl hadn’t passed unnoticed, but neither was it a thing of open derision or false concern. It was good to know, and she tucked the information away in the back of her mind, should she need it later. Joen Mallian suddenly squealed and clapped her hands together.

  “Did I tell you I’ve seen Curtin Issandrian? Last night, I was at a reception that Lady Klin held. Nothing formal, you understand, just a dinner party for a few people, and he is my cousin, so I was utterly obligated to go. And who should be there, sitting by the roses as if nothing was odd, but Curtin Issandrian? And you’ll hardly believe it. He’s cut his hair short!”

  “No!” one of the other women said. “But that was all he had that made him at all attractive.”

  “I can’t believe he’s still being seen with Alan Klin,” said another. “You’d think those two would put a bit more air between them after being lumped in with Feldin Maas.”

  Clara sat back a degree in her chair, listening, laughing, sharing bits of barely sweetened cake and biting lemon tea. For an hour, they spoke of everything and nothing, the words pouring out of them all in a flood. Even Clara with her love of winter also saw the joy of talking in company after so many weeks alone. This was how the court wove itself into a single tapestry—small gossip and news, speculations and enquiries, fashions and traditions. Her husband and sons would have made no more sense of it than of birdsong, but for Clara it was all as legible as a book.

  She took her leave early enough that she could walk back to her own mansion. Camnipol in spring could be a shockingly beautiful place. In her memory, the city was all of black and gold, and so the real stone and ivy always surprised her. Yes, the streets were cobbled dark and soot marked many walls. Yes, there were great burnished archways throughout the city, tributes to the victories of great generals, some of them generations dead. But there was also a common with a double line of burgundy-leaved trees, a Cinnae boy, pale and thin and ghostly, dancing on the street corner for coins while his mother sawed away on an ancient violin. Clara paused for a moment in an open square at the edge of the Division to watch a theater company declaim on their small, sad wagon-mounted stage. The actors playing tragic young lovers were decent enough, but the grandeur of the view behind them kept distracting her.

  The grandeur of the view, or else some part of her didn’t want to dwell on young love and tragedy. Not today, at least.

  At her house, Andrash rol Estalan, their Tralgu door slave, stood at the end of his silver chain. His ears were at high alert. His father had been one of her own father’s huntsmen, and she had a fond spot for him.

  “Your son is with Lord Skestinin’s son and daughter, my lady,” he said. “They are in the west garden.”

  “Thank you, Andrash. And is my husband at home?”

  “No, my lady. I believe he has gone to the Great Bear with Lord Daskellin.”

  “Likely that’s for the best,” she said. She took a deep breath. “All right.”

  The Tralgu bowed his head. He always could express sympathy gracefully.

  The west gardens were mostly rose and lilac, and neither of them yet in bloom. Jorey stood by a low stonework table where a young man and woman sat. The two guests both had hair the color of wheat and round features that looked better on the girl than her brother. In the gentle chill of early spring, all of them wore cloaks, but Jorey’s was wool and waxed cotton where the Skestinin siblings wore black, generously cut leather.

  “Mother,” Jorey said, lifting his chin as she drew near. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Don’t be silly, dear. Next you’ll be grateful that I walk myself to the breakfast table,” Clara said. “And this must be Sabiha. I haven’t seen you in an age. You look lovely. And this cannot be Bynal. Bynal Skestinin is a little boy with a toy sword who took all the roses off Amada Masin’s bushes.”

  “Lady Kalliam,” Lord Skestinin’s youngest son said as he stood. “My father would want me to thank you for accepting us in your home.”

  The girl nodded, but didn’t look up. Her gaze was cast at the ground, a mask of stoicism and humiliation. In truth, the gratitude offered to Clara was little more than the common form, but that didn’t matter. They all knew what none of them would say. Lord Skestinin and his family looked upon this as pity. House Kalliam was graciously lowering itself by bringing Sabiha through its door. In the opinion of most of the court of Antea, it was. Clara might not like it, but denying it was like trying to ignore away the wind.

  Clara chose her words carefully.

  “My eldest son has served under Lord Skestinin for years,” she said. “His children are always welcome in this house.”

  The boy bowed. He had a dueling scar on the back of his hand. For a moment, Clara was surprised, and then she wasn’t. He was old enough for the dueling yards, and had been for years. He was here no
w as chaperone of his sister’s honor. Likely he’d crossed steel over it at some point as well.

  “Mother,” Jorey said, “I’ve had formal introduction to Sabiha. I’m going to ask Father’s permission tomorrow.”

  Clara felt her eyebrows bolt toward her hairline and her gaze flickered over the girl. Even sitting and with the covering of the wide-cut cloak, she wouldn’t be able to hide a belly. Especially not for a second child, and with the amount of time it would have taken to send for a formal letter, receive it, and return from Osterling Fells to Camnipol, pregnancy simply didn’t seem plausible. Sabiha swallowed, her expression utterly empty. Everyone present knew the calculations Clara had just made. Everyone expected them.

  “That seems sudden,” Clara said. “Engagements can run a season or two these days.”

  “I don’t mind waiting,” the girl said.

  The pain in Jorey’s expression was vivid and fresh and angry. This wasn’t the girl’s idea, then. It was her son’s. He wanted to give her the season. He wanted her to go to the dances and feasts and fireshows as Sabiha Kalliam, and not Lord Skestinin’s disgraced daughter. Marrying into House Kalliam—and especially doing it now with the family’s star on the rise—would change the story people told about her. And changing that changed who she was.

  It was as profound a gift as a young man could offer the woman he loved.

  “Jorey, dear,” she said, “weren’t you saying that Bynal followed horses? I’m sure he’d be interested in the bay mare that your father brought from the holding.”

  “I don’t… That’s to say…” Jorey pressed his lips together until the color was all driven out from them. “Yes, Mother.” When the boys had gone, Clara sat across from the girl. She had a good face, but worn. It wasn’t only that she’d borne a child, though God knew that could change a woman’s body in ways the midwife never mentioned. It was sorrow. And shame. They’d been ground into the girl’s skin like soot. Of course they had.

  “Lady Kalliam,” the girl said. The pause lasted five heart-beats. Six. Tears were welling in the girl’s eyes, and Clara felt them answering in her own. She blinked them back. Empathy was well and good in its time, but that wasn’t this.

  “Don’t ever be grateful to him,” Clara said.

  Sabiha looked up, confused. A tear escaped, tracing silver down the girl’s cheek.

  “My lady?”

  “Jorey. If you love him and he loves you, then God knows nothing’s going to stop the pair of you. But you mustn’t be grateful to him. It will poison everything if you are.”

  Sabiha shook her head, another tear coming free but the last one. Her eyes were drying.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Clara shook her head. She couldn’t find the words that would explain it. How to explain the difference between a marriage grown from love—more than love, from complicity—and one that was unequal from the start. She had seen too many women married from ambition, and she had seen where they ended. She didn’t want her boy married to one of them. But the girl was a girl. Even if she’d suffered hard times, she could no more understand what Clara was saying than a songbird could swim.

  “Sabiha, dear,” Clara said. “Does he make you laugh?”

  Clara couldn’t see the memory behind the girl’s eyes, but she saw that it was there. The shape of Sabiha’s eyes changed and brightened, her lips grew a degree fuller as she forgot to press them thin. Clara knew the answer before the girl nodded.

  “All right, then,” Clara said. “I’m going to need more time, though. Jorey’s father is loyal as a hound, but change bothers him. I’ll need… a week. Can you and Jorey wait that long before asking permission?”

  “If we have to, we can do anything.”

  Clara rose, bent, and kissed the girl gently on the top of her head.

  “Spoken like a Kalliam,” she said. “Go find them, then. Tell Jorey what I said.”

  “You don’t want to talk to him?”

  “Not now,” Clara said, her heart sinking.

  She watched as the girl rose and left. There was happiness and relief in the way the girl walked, in the angle of her shoulders. She radiated. It wouldn’t last because nothing ever did, but it was good to see it all the same. Something bright moved at the corner of Clara’s vision, calling attention to itself. A sprig of lilac had bloomed, a dozen tiny flowers bright in the sun. It felt like an omen.

  How odd, Clara thought, that speaking to this girl would be the thing that clarified the other task she had to do.

  There was little call for huntsmen in Camnipol. Guards, yes. Servants, yes. The sort of personal servant who might take on extra duties or serve at the whim of a nobleman or his wife. She found Vincen Coe in the servants’ wing among the small corridors and tiny rooms that divided the architecture of the great from that of the low. He was a young man, hardly older than Jorey, with wide eyes and a body well accustomed to hardship and work. She had saved him once when her husband’s pique had nearly ended his service. He had saved her once when Feldin Maas would have cut her down. He rose when he caught sight of her, and she pushed away the memory of his lips against hers and the taste of blood. It had been a single stolen kiss, and he’d been bled nearly white when he’d presumed. Since then there had been no talk of it. Not even acknowledgment that it had happened. Nothing.

  And there would be nothing.

  “My lady,” he said, the words crisp as a bark.

  “Coe,” she said.

  There was no call to continue. It was her place to command and his to follow. She didn’t need to explain herself to him, except that she did need to.

  “Is there a problem, my lady?”

  “I love my family dearly,” she said. “And I will protect them from whatever dangers I can. And at whatever price is asked.”

  “Of course,” he said. He didn’t understand what she was saying any better than Sabiha Skestinin had.

  You’re a child, she wanted to say. Go find a girl your own age and make handsome, charming babies with her. You have no business with me.

  “I need you to return to Osterling Fells,” she said. “I want you to oversee the construction of my husband’s new kennels.”

  The shock on his face was like a blow. His face paled.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Have I given offense? What did I… ?”

  Clara clasped her hands behind her. The air in the servants’ quarters was somehow thinner than in the main house. Harder to breathe.

  “We both know what this is,” she said. “Are you truly going to make me explain it?”

  “I…”

  The huntsman bowed his head, and when he lifted it again, his expression wasn’t of a servant speaking to his master, and the depth of his voice gave his words an extra meaning that mere grammar didn’t carry.

  “I will serve my lady as she sees fit,” he said. “I have no other task.”

  “And if she sees fit to send you to the holding to look after the kennels?”

  “If she sees fit to send me to hell, my lady.”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” she whispered.

  For a moment, time stopped between them. A single moment with the duration of a season, because it was the last. Clara turned and walked slowly back to the main house. Her breath was returning to her slowly. She squared her shoulders. She wanted to go to her rooms, to sit with her embroidery and her pipe and recapture, if she could, a few moments of the quiet of winter. She wanted to be calm again. She wanted to be still.

  But Dawson’s voice carried through the front hall as she entered it. She knew from the tone of it that he was annoyed, but not truly angry. His moods and temper were as familiar to her as her own clothes, and as comforting. Two of his hunting dogs paced nervously in the corridor outside his study, whining under their breath and looking from Clara to the closed door and back again. She paused to scratch them gently behind the ears.

  Dawson sat at his desk. A letter spilled out over it. She didn’t need to see th
e royal seal. The quality of the paper and the precision of the handwriting was enough to know it came from King Simeon. She felt a moment’s relief. It wasn’t likely to be anything to do with Jorey.

  “A problem?” she asked.

  “Simeon’s moved back the audience with that half-wit bastard from Asterilhold,” Dawson said.

  “The ambassador, you mean?”

  “Yes, that,” Dawson said. “And the new date’s the same as Lord Bannien’s feast. And if that’s not enough, he’s asked for a private audience next week the same time I had a table of cards at the Great Bear with Daskellin and his fat cousin who doesn’t know how to play.”

  “Ah,” Clara said. She stepped toward him, her hand on his shoulder. He took her fingers in his, kissing her gently without even being aware that he was doing so. Affection was a habit between them, more genuine for being unconsidered. She felt the rise and fall of his body more than heard his sigh.

  “That man,” he said, “has no idea the things I sacrifice for him.”

  “He never will,” Clara said.

  Dawson

  T

  he Kingspire was not the original building that took the name. For as long as there had been a Camnipol, there had been a Kingspire, and so with every remaking of the city, every layer of history and ruin, some new castle had been built. Somewhere deep down, pressed into stone and forgotten, was the first Kingspire and the bones of the first kings.