The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  They weren’t permitted to sleep under the stars anymore. Instead, they had a room in the back of the café and bedded down on a thin cotton mattress that had seen cleaner days.

  “Friends, I take it?”

  “When I first came into the world, I spent the better part of a year in Suddapal,” Master Kit said, laying his bedroll out over the mattress. Probably wise. At least all the insects living in their bedrolls were familiar. “I stayed here. Epetchi was just a boy then. Thin as a stick and couldn’t think about anything but girls.”

  “Do you think they can help us, then?”

  “I think that if they can, they will. That may not be quite the same thing. But I have more faith in goodwill built with meals and shared stories than goodwill bought from strangers with coin.”

  “You know,” Marcus said, “I didn’t force you to pay the finder’s fee.”

  “The world’s an odd place,” Kit said, and sat down with a grunt. “The last time I was here, everything was different. I was different, they were. Even the building’s changed. There wasn’t a wall there, at least not that I recall. And yet it was all related. It’s as if the world was a stone, hard and unchanging as we lay paint over it, one layer and then another and then another. We change it by the weight of the stories we bring to it, but we only change what’s there. Not the stone nature of the world.”

  “That sounds very deep,” Marcus said. “Don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, though. Do you think they know someone with a good boat?”

  T

  he captain of the little sailing boat was a Timzinae woman with a broad face and a wicked smile. At Epetchi’s instructions, they met her near the end of one of the long piers. So far from the shore, Marcus felt he’d already left the city. She sat in the back of her boat, wrapping long, braided ropes in patterns that Marcus, in another context, would have mistaken for art. Her name, they’d been told, was Adasa Orsun.

  The boat itself was small enough for one person to manage, large enough to carry five if they didn’t need to lay in provisions for a long trek across open water. The deck was white as snow and its sails were square sheets of thick canvas dyed the blue of the sea. It bobbed with the waves, a little up, a little down. As close as it rode to the waterline, Marcus couldn’t imagine how it would keep from being swamped in a storm. But there were at least a dozen other boats similar to it tied to the pier, so there was something to the design or the handling that made it possible.

  That or they just didn’t put out to sea if there was weather.

  Master Kit made the introductions.

  “We were led to understand you might be willing to take passengers south to Lyoneia,” he said.

  “Might be,” the woman said. “For the right price. When are you wanting to leave?”

  “Sooner would be better,” Master Kit said with a smile. “Can’t go for a month,” she said with a shrug. “Other work already agreed to.”

  Marcus didn’t need little black things living in his veins to know it was a lie. The woman smiled up at them. The next move was theirs.

  “I am a friend of Epetchi’s,” Master Kit said.

  “And so I’m talking to you,” she answered. The rope flowed in loops over her arm and cascaded down.

  “I can pay,” Kit said, tossing her a small leather purse. She didn’t open it, just tested the weight in the palm of her hand.

  “This gold?”

  “Silver. Some copper.”

  “And a pretty stone I put in,” Marcus said. “If we can stop dancing, what’s it going to take to get this”—he pointed at the deck—“there?” He pointed at the sea stretching away to the south.

  The woman looked at him, then turned back to Kit.

  “Who’s he?”

  “My name’s Marcus Wester.”

  “Sure it is,” she said, not looking at him.

  “His name is Marcus Wester,” Kit said. “And yes, he’s that Marcus Wester.”

  “Is not.”

  “Listen to me,” Kit said with a sigh. “Listen to my voice. This man is Marcus Wester. He is.”

  “Have been since before people thought much of it,” Marcus said.

  Adasa Orsun tucked the purse into her jacket.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Bring your things. The tide’s in six hours, and we’ll be out on it.”

  “Because everyone wants to travel with me?” Marcus said.

  “Makes a good story,” she said, turning back to her ropes. “You best hurry. Get some good food while you’re at it. I’ve got enough to keep everyone alive, but I run a ship, not a kitchen.”

  As they walked back down the long stretch of tar-soaked logs that made the pier, Marcus shook his head.

  “I don’t like that,” he said. “She doesn’t know us. Not really. What if I was a terrible, violent, mean-spirited person? I mean, I’m mostly known for killing my employer. You wouldn’t think that would make traveling with me more attractive.”

  “I think we are the stories people tell about us,” Kit said.

  “No,” Marcus said. “We aren’t. We’re more than that. And our friend on the boat there is taking a stupid risk by going with us.”

  “I suppose so,” Kit said. “But I’m still glad she is.”

  Clara

  C

  lara could not tell whether the darkness had taken the city, the kingdom, the world as a whole, or only her. When she rose in the morning, the sky seemed dimmer than it had before. When she ate, the salt seemed both weaker and less palatable at the same time. She slept little, waking in the middle of the night and staring up at the ceiling that wasn’t hers. Sometimes she forgot why Dawson wasn’t beside her, and then recalled, and felt the despair roll over her afresh. As if it were all happening again.

  But she didn’t allow herself to stop. If she stopped, she was certain she would never start again. It wasn’t even that she would die. She would simply be, still and grey and unmoving. A statue of herself in stone.

  “Good morning, Mother,” Barriath said as he stepped into the little dining room. “There’s eggs ready.”

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “You rested well, I hope?”

  “Well enough.”

  In a better world, he would have been gone again by now. Back to the north and the ships. His place with the navy. Instead, he would spend the day brooding, going to tap-houses. And she would go instead along the streets and into the courtyards where she was barely welcome and see to it that her family survived this all as best they could. Or at least that part that hadn’t died.

  The rain, when it came, hadn’t been a massive cloudburst, but a slow, low drizzle that made everything damp without cleaning anything. It did, however, bring the colors of everything out: the red stone arches of the Lias Gate looked like the coals from a fire that had almost burned out. The carving of the bear outside the Fraternity of the Great Bear looked less like a dust-colored dog on its back legs and more like a predator. Even Issandrian’s overly carved and decorated mansion was lent a kind of beauty by the rain. She would have to tell Dawson about that, only she wouldn’t.

  Issandrian received her in his withdrawing room, offering her coffee and baked cheese and even a pipe’s bowl of tobacco. Clara forced herself to accept less than she wanted. When she sat on the little white-upholstered divan, she could already see from his expression that the news was bad.

  “My lady,” he said. “I am doing everything in my power, but I warned you at the start how little influence I have. And forgive my saying so, but the Kalliam name is tainted. It’s being used among the court members as another way to say traitor.”

  “Still, there must be something, mustn’t there?” she asked, sipping at her coffee. “There were houses who fought at my husband’s side. He had those sympathetic to him.”

  “Not the way the story goes now,” Issandrian said. “To hear it, he fought the throne single-handed. The houses whose banners flew by yours were all neutral now and never took arms, and the hou
ses that weren’t in the streets at all were fighting on the side of Palliako. Not all will escape judgment, but they will all try to.”

  “I see,” she said, and she did. Court life was always a tissue of reputation and rumor. This was no different.

  “I haven’t given up all hope,” Issandrian said. “There is discussion of an expedition to Hallskar. It’s possible that if they go by water, they’ll need a captain. I can’t get Barriath command of the ship with the actual members of court sailing on it, but there may be cargo ships, and with the right word in the right ear, Barriath could be hired on to take that.”

  It was, she thought, a terrible lot of conditional phrases for a single statement. Still, she smiled the gratitude that she knew she ought to feel. They chatted for a few moments more, Clara savoring coffee and pipe, and then it was time to keep on. Time to not stop.

  House Annerin was gone, leaving the city even before the close of the season and taking her daughter and grandson with them. The intention was to avoid precisely the kind of social call Clara was making, but still, she walked to the door slave and made her enquiries. No, my lady, the family had not returned and were not expected until after the winter. But yes, he could accept yet another letter and see that it found its way to her daughter. At Canl Daskellin’s mansion, they were very sorry, but the whole of the family was indisposed. Perhaps if she called another day.

  She walked for most of the morning, stopping at half a dozen houses, and hoping without reason to hope that by her presence she could force the world to open a place for her boys.

  When, near midday, she returned, feet aching, to Lord Skestinin’s house, the fight was already under way again.

  “I’m a sailor,” Barriath shouted. “I could drink three times that and be more sober than you are waking up.”

  She was accustomed to the sound of fraternal battle, but the voice Jorey spoke in now was low and cold and unfamiliar.

  “You’ve disrespected my wife in her own home,” Jorey said. “You have to leave.”

  Clara walked through the hall, her spine straight. Not here too. She could stand to fight the world, if she had to. She would endure the pain of waking alone in her unfamiliar bed with the echoes of her husband’s death still in her ears, but she couldn’t do it all here too. There had to be one place—one—where she could rest and draw strength. If it wasn’t her family, she didn’t know where it could be.

  “I’m not staying,” Barriath said as she stepped into the room. “Wouldn’t do it on a bet. But take it clear, I’m not the one looking down on Sabiha. She’s your wife and so she’s my sister, and it’s her fairweather friends you’re talking to. Not me.”

  Both her boys turned to her.

  “What,” Clara said. The exhaustion in her voice weighted the word so heavily that it was all she could manage. “What?”

  Jorey looked to his brother, then down. When he spoke, his jaw was set forward. It was something Dawson had done too. Clara wondered whether it was the boy imitating the man, or if there was something in the blood that would have made Kalliam men do that even if they’d never met.

  “Sabiha arranged a garden party,” Jorey said. “A half dozen of her old friends. Some that had stayed by her even through the… last scandal. They all sent regrets.”

  “And he’s blaming me,” Barriath said. “I wasn’t rude. I didn’t track these girls down and tell them to turn their backs on Sabiha.”

  “You didn’t need to,” Jorey said. “Everyone knows we’re here.”

  “We’re not,” Barriath said. “You are, but I’m elsewhere. I’m sorry, Mother.”

  She wanted to ask where he was going. How she would reach him. All the thousand questions that would have let her keep some semblance of family together. But she was too tired, her mind too scattered. He brushed past her as he walked out the door, and she felt like the motion of his passing could have knocked her over. Jorey hadn’t moved. His face was pale and pained. Sabiha had appeared at his elbow.

  “Mother, this isn’t going to work.”

  “It will,” she said. “It’s only hard now, but it will work. Barriath is in mourning. We all are. You have to treat him gently.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “You said that you wanted me to be to Sabiha what Father was to you.”

  “That’s right. I want that.”

  “Father put you ahead of everyone. Everything. If you’d asked him to, he would have done anything. There was no limit.”

  “That’s true, I think,” she said, but Jorey was shaking his head. Tears flowed down his cheeks the way they hadn’t since he was a child. Not even on the terrible day when Geder had killed her husband.

  “I can’t do this,” he said, and then again, more softly. “I can’t.”

  “I will,” Sabiha said, and put a hand on Clara’s shoulder. “Please. Come sit with me for a moment, my lady.”

  Clara let herself be led to a window seat. Sabiha sat beside her, holding her hand. The girl looked thinner. And not just in her face and body. For a time just after the wedding, there had been joy in her. A hopefulness born of seeing the changes that her new reputation brought. That was gone now, and Clara knew why. She knew, almost, what Sabiha was steeling herself to say. The words that had defeated Jorey.

  “We love you,” Sabiha said, “and we will always be your family, but you need to leave this house.”

  It was strange. Clara actually felt the words cut into her. It was a physical sensation at the neck and heart.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “It’s hard enough for Jorey alone,” Sabiha said, her fingers pressing Clara’s hand. “But everyone saw him when he renounced Lord Kalliam. They’re willing to give him a chance. Well, some of them are. But you didn’t speak. Bar riath didn’t. And truly, even if you had, my lady, no one can see you without seeing your husband too. You were too much the same thing, and even with him gone, you carry him with. You see that, don’t you? You understand?”

  “I do,” Clara said. “I feel him myself.”

  “Until the court forgets, at least a little, having you with us taints us more than it protects you.”

  “I will go,” Clara said. “If there’s room at the holding, I can… exile myself, I suppose.”

  “We were thinking that we could pay for a boarding house,” Sabiha said. “Something that wasn’t in my father’s name. Something to give us a little distance in the eyes of the court.”

  Not even that much? Clara wanted to say. Can’t you give me that one small thing? Must it be an anonymous grave of a room, in among people she’d never known?

  “I can see why that would be wise,” she said. “I’ll gather my things.”

  “No, please,” Sabiha said. “I’ll have them brought. You shouldn’t have to.”

  “None of us should have to,” Clara said, patting the girl’s shoulder. “But we live in a world of necessities. Don’t bother yourself. I understand. I should go now.”

  “No, please,” Sabiha said. “We’ll have someone go with you to find the right place. And we’ll bear the price of it.”

  Clara’s smile almost felt real. She took her hands out from the girl’s grasp and stood. She kissed Sabiha and Jorey both, each of them on the forehead, and took herself back out. There was no staying now. No sitting in the kitchen and discussing what sort of boarding house might be right for the widow of a famed traitor and enemy of the throne.

  By renouncing Dawson, they were supposed to have gained something. Protected it. Kept it. And perhaps they had. Perhaps if Jorey hadn’t said what he’d said, Clara would have even less than she did now. But she could hardly imagine it. She felt like the queen of nothing.

  She walked without knowing where she was walking to. Her feet ached terribly, but she ignored the pain. Once, she’d ridden through the city as the small people in the street made way for her, and she’d thought nothing of it. Now she found that she was moving aside to let carts of meat or turnips pass. She was avoiding the eyes of the me
n and women she passed.

  When the great arcing span of the Autumn Bridge rose up before her, she began across it, but at the midway point, she stopped. It wasn’t even that she intended to, it was only there that she was when her resolve finally broke. Leaning against the great beams and looking down over the abyss of the Division, she felt something like peace come over her. Not peace, not really, but something like it. The world looked almost beautiful at this distance. The Kingspire. The walls of the city. The clouds scudding quickly overhead, caught in some unthinkably high wind that she herself could not feel.

  She considered how little it would take to step over the edge. Not that she intended to. Self-slaughter was too easy, in its way. But it did have its appeal. She’d never been religious, but neither had she refused the priestly stories of life and justice on the farther side of death. Perhaps Dawson was there waiting for her.

  But not yet. Vicarian’s position wasn’t assured, even now. And Barriath… poor Barriath, turned out of the house by his own brother. He needed her still. And Jorey would. Even Sabiha might. And how terrible would it be for the girl to have sent her husband’s mother out, only to have her leap off a bridge. The poor thing would never recover.

  No. Another day, she would. Later, when all her children were taken care of and no one would feel responsible for a decision that was utterly her own. Then she could come, dressed perhaps in bridal array, and take one last brief dance with Dawson. She was weeping now. She didn’t know how long she had been. Days. Weeks. All her life, it seemed. All those years of content had been an illusion. A thin line that she had walked over an abyss. Without a home to go to, without a friend to rely on, she was reduced to the aspect of a madwoman wailing on the bridge, and she found the role fit well enough.

  “My lady,” a man’s voice said, like warm flannel on a cold night. “No.”

  She turned, surprised. Some part of her that still cared about such things reached to straighten her hair and tug her dress into its best drape. The rest of her, the vast majority, collapsed in a hilarity of relief and embarrassment and an amused kind of dread that was much more pleasant than the sincere one she’d been inhabiting.