The King's Blood Read online

  “I promise,” she said.

  F

  or all that Cithrin had remade herself as an upstanding and important citizen of Birancour, she had never been inland farther than the coastal mountains and foothills that separated it from the Free Cities, and then in the grip of winter. She had imagined it all to be like that—rolling hills and stones punctuated by forests and meadows. The land between the Free Cities had been like that where it hadn’t been mud and snow. It was only when she passed out from the last trailing houses and farms of Porte Oliva that she saw the wide, open sweep of the land and heard the voice of the grass singing for the first time in her life.

  The interior of Birancour was flat, without so much as a hill to break the horizon, and the dragon’s jade road passed through it. Cithrin found herself imagining that the road was a living thing that folded in on itself behind them and rose up before, a companion sea serpent escorting her across the oceanic grass. If she’d been asked, she would have said that the sound of tall grass shifting in the breeze would be like a scratching, like rubbing handfuls of straw together. It was like walking under a waterfall. Even the lightest breath of wind roared, and after the third day, Cithrin began to hear things inside it—voices and music, flutes and drums and once a vast choir of voices lifted together in song.

  Farmhouses and cultivated fields seemed to rise up and fall away like images from a dream. She almost expected the men and women they met on the road to be some new, unknown race, or to speak with the hush of the grasslands in their voices, but instead they were Firstblood and Cinnae, their faces leathery with the sun and palms yellow and callused. The people seemed so familiar and common and prosaic that Cithrin began to tell herself it was only the unfamiliarity and her own anxiety that made the place seem somehow less than real. When a massive creature easily half the size of her own horse but black and wet-looking with dagger teeth and an improbably ornate and flowerlike nose slid across the road before them, it took her guard’s yelp of alarm to convince her it was real.

  In the end and despite his joke, Marcus had sent only two guards with her. Two Firstbloods named Barth and Corisen Mout. When night came without a wayhouse or caravanserai, one would take his horse out into the grass, walking it in a circle like a dog until a round space had been crushed down. Even though the grass was wet and green, they didn’t start fires.

  Cithrin lay in her tiny leather sleeping tent, one arm out before her and her head pillowed on the flesh of it. The top of it was only a few inches above her, and it held the heat of her body surprisingly well. She was shakingly tired, her back and legs sore from riding. The knot in her gut was like an old, unwelcome companion, returned when it was least wanted, and it would not let her sleep. So she feigned it, closing her eyes when she remembered to and trying without success or hope not to listen to her guardsmen talking. Gossiping. About Marcus.

  “The way I heard it, Springmere knew the captain was the only reason he was winning the war,” Barth said. “Got to where he’d scared himself half crazy that he was going to switch sides. So after the battle of Ellis, Springmere got a bunch of the uniforms off Lady Tracian’s dead, put his own men in them, and sent ’em after the captain’s family. Held the captain down while his wife and baby burned.”

  “Wasn’t a baby,” Corisen Mout said. “Girl was six, seven years old.”

  “His little girl, then.”

  “Just saying she wasn’t a baby. How’d the captain find out it was a trick?”

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t until after Lady Tracian’d been put in the stocks, though.”

  “I thought he knew before and was just playing along. Spent a year finishing the war and letting Springmere get himself king and feel like he was safe before he brought the bastard down.”

  “Might have been. There anything left in that skin?”

  Cithrin heard the sloshing of wine. The blades of grass at the camp’s edge shifted in near-silence, and she realized she’d opened her eyes again. Scowling, she pressed them closed.

  “One way or the other, Springmere gets himself made king of Northcoast, starts riding back for Carse, ready to take control of the place. Sitting in his tent, making lists of all the heads he’s going to chop off, when the captain comes in and explains how he knows what happened. Next thing anyone knows, Wester’s drenched in blood with an axe in his hand. Walks to the stocks, chops Lady Tracian loose, and gives her this crown that’s still got bits of Springmere on it, says it’s hers now for all he cares. And after that… gone. Steps out of history until there he was in Porte Oliva hiring guards for the magistra.”

  The round, hissing sound of wine being squirted into someone’s mouth.

  “You think he’s in love with the magistra?”

  “Barth! She’s—”

  “Ah, she’s asleep for hours. Seriously, though. Here he is, could build himself a private army, take garrison work at four, five times what we’re making now. But he stays there. There’s half the girls in the taproom would lay back for him, and he’s careful as glass never to let any of them think he means anything.”

  “No, it’s just he’s still being faithful to his dead wife. Can’t be with a woman except he starts thinking about her.”

  “Eh, I think he’s mad for the magistra.”

  “I’m telling you it’s old grief turned to stone in him,” Corisen Mout said. “Besides, the magistra’s a sweet face, but she’s got no tits.”

  “Oh, brother mine,” Barth said with a chuckle, “you had best pray she’s asleep—”

  “I’m not,” Cithrin said.

  The silence seemed to last forever. She pulled herself out of the tent, then stood. The starlight leached the two men of all color. Their expressions were contrite. The wineskin was in Barth’s hand. She walked over and took it from him.

  “You’ve had more than enough. Sleep now,” she said. “Both of you.”

  Without another word, the two men curled up in their bedrolls. Cithrin stood over them until she started to feel ridiculous and then went back to her little tent. The conversation had stopped, but Cithrin lay in the darkness awake all the same. The wine wasn’t the best she’d had, but it wasn’t the worst. After half the skin, it began to loosen the knot in her belly, the way she remembered it doing the first time she’d taken to the road. Her eyes closed more easily now with the alcohol softening her body and making everything seem slightly more benign. When her mind turned to Marcus—he couldn’t be in love with her, could he? It would be like Magister Imaniel wanting her as a bride. He was handsome enough, but he was so old—she consciously turned toward the fine work of trade. The losses for the Stormcrow were going to be listed in the report, but the gains from its recovery wouldn’t. She needed to make sure they knew that at the holding company. And that Pyk hadn’t wanted to invoke salvage on the recovered cargo that wasn’t part of their insurance contract.

  She began to wonder how a contract would be worded to protect recovered goods from then being recovered by someone else. It would be possible, she supposed, but she hadn’t seen it done. She’d need to know what the magistrates thought about it. If they were all agreed that Pyk was wrong and the salvage legitimate, the bank could offer very good rates on the contract. Full coverage for ten percent only sounds wise if there’s a chance the contract will be enforced…

  Slowly, Cithrin felt her mind drifting out from under her, the wine and the distraction of contracts mixing with the hushing grass. She realized that her eyes had been closed for some time now, and without her effort. Half sleeping, she capped the wineskin, rolled over, and let her body sink in toward the trampled grass. Another few days to Sara-sur-Mar. Then the ship. And then Carse, and some way to con vince them all to take Pyk Usterhall, drop her down a well, and give the bank back to Cithrin.

  Dawson

  T

  he army left Camnipol a week after Lord Ashford’s hands. With so little time, it was a small force. Twenty knights with their squires. Four hundred sword-and-bows, most of them peasant f
armers taken off the land in the middle of the planting. Perhaps two dozen were professional soldiers, though almost a hundred had walked a battlefield sometime in their lives. They wore what armor came to hand and carried the swords and pikes and hunter’s bows kept in attics and cellars against this day. They marched even as the word went out to the south and east that the others would gather. It might take a month for the second and larger force to come together, marching up from the southern holdings or west from the border with Sarakal. At an estimate, the empire could field an army six thousand strong, armed and armored, and still have men enough in the fields to avoid starving next spring.

  But that would come later. Now the horses of the knights rode along the wide jade path, and carts of food and fodder came along after. Behind the column, Camnipol faded until the Kingspire itself was little more than a smudge against the horizon. And at the head of the army, Lord Marshal Dawson Kalliam rode with his son Jorey at his side, moving fast as if trying to pull the army along behind by example and force of will.

  To look at the map, Asterilhold was little more than a wide strip of land dividing Imperial Antea from Northcoast, caught between the two great northern kingdoms like a squire standing between two knights. The length of Asteril-hold’s coastline was the least of all three nations. It boasted only two great cities: Kaltfel and Asinport. Its protections were deeper than simple lines of ink on parchment would show. In the south, the river Siyat found its mouth by draining wide marshes fed by runoff from the mountains along its southern border. Invasion from the Dry Wastes would be difficult and time-consuming. From the west, boggy and prone to disease. The river itself—the Siyat—was navigable in the northernmost reaches, but for most of its length was muddy, cold, unreliable, and deep. The only Antean city to declare itself against the Severed Throne in a generation was Anninfort, which sat on the river’s edge, breathing the air of Asterilhold and giving home to men loyal to both kingdoms.

  Dawson had studied the wars between the minor kings and the separation of Antea before it became an empire of its own, and the difference between a fast conflict, quickly ended and a grinding, bloody war that could stretch out for years was Seref Bridge.

  A day’s ride south of Kaltfel, a ribbon of dragon’s jade spanned the water over a rapids. The story was that the road predated the river, that the dragon’s road had once passed through a plain, and thousands of years of erosion had made a bridge of it. Garrison keeps squatted at both sides, glowering at one another across the span. The nation that controlled both keeps controlled the war, and Dawson’s best hope was to reach the bridge with a great enough force to overwhelm the farther side before King Lechan had recovered from the shock of Geder Palliako’s rage. Any assault across the bridge would take its toll in blood, but to lose five hundred men in an afternoon now would save five thousand from dying in marshes and fords, on ships and beaches, over the course of years.

  Dawson’s camp tent stood solid as a house. Thick leather stretched across iron frames to make walls and rooms. A brazier stood in the middle of the central chamber, its smoke rising in a pale grey spiral to the chimney hole in the roof. Crickets sang all around him as he ate a dinner of chicken and apples and outrage. His sometime ally Canl Daskellin sat across from him, peeling an apple of his own with a dagger and the strength of his thumb.

  “I don’t know what you’re proposing, old friend,” Daskellin said.

  “I’m not proposing anything.”

  “No?” A long green spiral of skin fell to the floor, pale flesh clinging to one side. “Because it sounds as if you were accusing the Lord Regent of treason against the crown.”

  “I’m not calling for a coup. I don’t want anyone’s head on a pike. Or at least not anybody important. If we whipped all Palliako’s cultists out of the city with chains, I can’t say I’d mind.”

  “Still…”

  “I know what I saw, Canl. You’d have seen it too if you’d watched. He goes everywhere with that pet priest. And what do we know about them and their spider goddess? We moved too quickly. We let the panic over Maas and the relief at his failure stampede us.”

  “First time that’s happened in history,” Daskellin said dryly. “We’ve had bad regencies and we’ve had bad kings. We’ve had decent kings with bad advisors and kings who ruled half drunk from a whorehouse while their advisors saw to it that the kingdom didn’t burn down. Speaking as Special Ambassador to Northcoast, I’m not pleased that we’re cutting ambassadors into small bits, but apart from that, I don’t see the difference.”

  “I do,” Dawson said. “Those were our bad kings. Our bad advisors. They were Antean. This time we’ve given ourselves into the power of foreigners.”

  Daskellin’s silence sounded like agreement. When he spoke, his voice was low and thoughtful.

  “Are you thinking that we’re in someone else’s war?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Dawson said, plucking the flesh off his chicken with his fingers. At home or at a feast, he would never have done so, but this was war, and he was on campaign. “I’m saying that if Palliako does owe his loyalty to these people, we’re just as badly off as if Maas had put his cousin from Asterilhold on our throne.”

  “I have the feeling that you’re asking something of me. I’m not sure what it is.”

  “I want you to sound them out. Not everyone, but the men Palliako brought to respectability. Broot and Veren. Men like that. Find out if they’re loyal to Palliako.”

  “Of course they are,” Daskellin said. “We all are. You are. We’re here marching and drilling instead of being at court. That’s the sign of loyalty.”

  Dawson shook his head.

  “I’ve come because the Lord Regent commanded it,” he said. “Not for Geder Palliako.”

  Daskellin laughed, and for a moment the crickets stopped their songs. He cut a slice from the apple and popped it into his mouth before pointing the blade at Dawson.

  “You’re making very fine distinctions. You should watch that or you’ll turn into a politician.”

  “Don’t be rude,” Dawson said. “There’s nothing to be done until the war’s finished, one way or the other. But as long as I am Lord Marshal, it’s my duty to cultivate the loyalty of the high houses. And when we’ve finished with Asterilhold, those priests have to be dealt with.”

  Canl Daskellin sighed.

  “You’re a difficult man to conspire with, Dawson. The last time we did this, it didn’t go well.”

  Dawson frowned, and then a slow, joyless smile spread across his lips.

  “Now I think you’re asking something of me,” he said.

  “My youngest. Sanna. She’s taken a liking to the Lord Regent. Once we purge these cultist friends of his, I was thinking your boy Jorey might hold a ball. Make some introductions.”

  The words You want me as your daughter’s procurer? came to Dawson’s tongue, but he took another bite of chicken, and they stayed there.

  “Sanna seems a lovely girl,” Dawson said. “Whatever happens, I’d be pleased to help her in any way I can.”

  “Spoken like a diplomat,” Daskellin said. Dawson frowned, but didn’t reply. He would accept insult. For now, anyway. There was time. If he failed at Seref Bridge, there might be nothing but time. And blood and battles. Daskellin seemed to lose himself in the slow-rising smoke from the brazier. His dark brows were troubled.

  “One question for you,” he said. “Do you think it’s true? Do you think that King Lechan knew. That he approved?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  Daskellin nodded.

  “I do too,” he said. “So for now, at least, your conspiracy of foreign priests is in the right.”

  T

  he morning smelled of wildflowers. Rain had fallen in the night, wetting the ground, and the morning sun had heated it. Mist hovered no higher than a walking man’s knees. The scouts had come to Dawson at first light, and so he was prepared for the sight.
The river curved up from the south in a carved canyon of earth and stone. It ran high with the night’s rain, white spray rising almost to the pale strip of jade that spanned it. On the far shore, the keep was as round as a drum, as high as three men, and made from grey stone and mortar the color of old blood. On the Antean shore—his shore—the building was square and made of chalk-white brick. The arrow slits looked down on the dragon’s road as it entered the keep and as it left. The merlons were narrow, with barely enough room for an archer to stand and fire and step back.

  The banners of Asterilhold flew over both keeps, but they were few. Three stood on the white keep, limp and dark with dew and damp. Two others claimed the farther side. Behind Dawson, twenty knights from fifteen houses. Bannien and Broot, Corenhall and Osterling Fells, the houses and holdings of Antea. Fifteen banners to their five. Four hundred men to whatever lurked behind those arrow slits.

  Jorey rode up beside him. The boy’s face was pale and closed. He had a wife at home now. Dawson remembered the first fight he’d ridden into when he knew he’d be leaving a widow behind. It changed things.

  “They’re split,” Jorey said. “Why are they split?”

  “In hopes of holding both sides,” Dawson said. “If they put all their men on our soil and we beat them back, they come to the far keep in disarray. If they put all their men in the far keep, they lose safe passage over the river.”

  “They’ll pull back now, though,” Jorey said. “They’re fortified, but we’ve numbers. They have to know that. If they make a stand together on the farther side, they stand a chance, at least. Splitting their own forces is madness.”

  “It’s bravery,” Dawson said. “Those three banners? They’re not there to win the battle. They’re there to hold us back until reinforcements come.”

  “We can overrun the far keep,” Jorey said. “With the men we have, we will take it.”