The King's Blood Read online

  “Perhaps not with the men we have after the white keep’s ours, though. And if their reinforcements come, not at all.” Dawson turned in his saddle, his eyes on his squire. “Sound formation. We haven’t got time.”

  They took the field, archers and swordsmen, pikemen and the small siege tower, its ram a log with its head dipped in bronze and long enough for three men to take each side. Dawson had seen midwinter festivals that had put more wood in the grate. But these were not castles, only river keeps, and the small ram was what they had to work with.

  His army took formation. There was only one task left before the world turned to steel and blood. He called for Fallon Broot. The man trotted over, his comic mustache flopping up and down with the gait of his mount.

  “Lord Broot,” Dawson said. “Will you take the honors?”

  “Pleased to, Lord Marshal,” he said, and to his credit, he sounded as though he actually was. Broot took the caller’s horn from Dawson’s squire and rode out toward the pale brick keep. When he judged himself just out of arrow’s range, Broot stopped and lifted the horn to his mouth. Dawson strained to hear.

  “In the name of King Aster, and of Lord Regent Palliako, and in the name of the Severed Throne, do you yield?”

  It seemed for a moment the day held its breath. An answer came, but too faint to make out. Then a flight of arrows flashing silver in the morning sun and falling just short of Broot and his mount. The knight lifted the horn to his mouth again.

  “Remember that I offered, y’cocksuckers!”

  Broot rode back hard, his face ruddy and his weak chin jutting forward. He surrendered the caller’s horn.

  “I say we split their asses, Lord Marshal.”

  “Noted, sir. And my thanks,” Dawson said. “Call the foot attack.”

  As Dawson watched, the attack surged forward like water after a dam has given way. Arrows flew from the white keep’s slits and archers appeared on the merlons. Over the shouting of the attack, Dawson could make out no individual screaming, but he’d seen enough of war to know it was there. At the distance of command, it looked almost calm, but within that flow of bodies, it was the loudest, most joyful and frightening feeling in the world. They had committed, and now there was no turning back.

  Thin ladders rose into the air with barbed hooks at the end to make them more difficult to shove back. The dull thud of the battering ram came, and again, and again. The soldiers of Antea who had shields had them raised over their heads, but there were few. Two of the ladders took hold and men swarmed up them. Dawson watched, his teeth worrying at his lips. There was movement to the north. At the edge of the river. Men, wearing the colors of Asterilhold. A hundred of them at least. They had hidden in the muck and cold by the river’s edge, preparing to fall on the enemy from behind. “Call danger in the north,” Dawson said, and his squire lifted the trumpet. Three short blasts for danger, two long for north. The ambush looked to be swordsmen for the greatest part. Only a few pikes seemed to waver in the air. The battering ram’s dull thud carried over everything, but the shouting changed. Dawson’s men shifted toward the new enemy.

  “The charge,” Dawson shouted, drawing his blade. “Sound the charge.”

  Dawson and the knights of Antea flew down toward the river and the waiting foe. There were more pikes than it had seemed, but not enough. A horse screamed and fell somewhere behind Dawson and to the left, but by the time he heard it he was already in the press, hewing at men’s heads and shoulders. To his right, Makarian Vey, Baron of Corren-hall, was swinging a battle hammer and shouting out an old taproom song. To his left, Jorey was chasing down an enemy soldier whose nerve had broken. Dawson’s fingers ached pleasantly and there was blood on his sword. The steady rhythm of the battering ram changed and a shout rose from the south. The white keep’s door, giving way.

  “The keep!” he shouted. “Finish them, and to the keep! Push these bastards back! Antea and Simeon!”

  A ragged shout answered him, and the knights of Antea turned with him, riding fast to the white keep.

  The bodies of Antean soldiers and farmers, men and boys, lay on the soft ground outside the keep, fallen from the ladders or arrow-pierced. Not all were dead. Within, the sounds of combat and murder rang. Dawson didn’t dismount, but rode through the keep’s yard, leaning hard toward the far gate. His knights rode behind him. The jade bridge reached across the river. Old rails had been built at its sides, worn planks bound to the jade top and bottom and nailed together. The wood was faded and splintering, a broken and decayed human work over the eternal and uncaring artifact of the dragons.

  Somewhere between thirty and forty men stood on the bridge. Behind them at the far side of the river the round keep stood. It looked taller from here, its wide wall leaning slightly out to make scaling it more difficult. Its gate was closed, shutting out both enemy and ally.

  But when they opened it to bring their men in, there would be a chance.

  “To me!” Dawson shouted. “All men to me!”

  His squire was long left behind, but the knights and the soldiers took up the call. To the Lord Marshal tolled through the keep like a bell. Six men took up the fallen battering ram, trotting up with it to just within the gate. One of them was a mess of blood, his right ear gone. On the bridge, the defeated men wailed and clamored to the round keep for shelter or steeled themselves for the charge.

  And then, above them, a new banner rose. And another. A third. A fourth.

  The reinforcements had come. Dawson looked over his shoulder at the assembled men. Of his knights, almost all remained with him. Of his foot, less. Much less. But there was a chance.

  “Archers fore!” he shouted.

  A dozen men, not more, ran to the gate, bows in their hands.

  “Don’t go all at once, boys,” Dawson said over the roar of the river and the laments of the bridge-trapped men. “We’re moving the bastards on the far side to pity. So take this slow.”

  One at a time, Dawson’s archers loosed arrows. The men on the bridge had nowhere to flee. They screamed and they wept and they shouted rage. Once, they charged Dawson’s line and were pushed back. The crowd of them grew smaller. Twenty men. Eighteen. Fourteen. Ten. The green of the jade and the red of the blood were like a thing from a painter’s brush, too beautiful to be wholly real. In despair, one man leaped into the churning water. Nine. Dawson kept his attention on the gate against which the doomed men were beating. It didn’t open.

  It wouldn’t.

  “End them all and close the gate,” Dawson said at last. “We’ll send word to the Lord Regent that the invasion is pushed back and the border secured.”

  And that we were too late, he didn’t say. He raised his sword and pulled it down, making his duelist’s salute to the opposing command as the white keep’s gate closed before him. The first battle of the war was a standoff, and if his experience told him anything, this was a sign of things to come.

  Marcus

  I

  ’ll kill you,” the Kurtadam man shouted. His fists were balled at his sides. His furred cheeks and forehead softened the anguish in his face, leaving him looking less like a man whose hopes of a better life were being crushed and more like a disappointed puppy. “You can’t do this, I’ll kill you.”

  “You won’t,” Marcus said. “Really, just stop.”

  The queensman was a Firstblood boy hardly older than Cithrin. He nodded toward the weeping Kurtadam but spoke to Marcus.

  “That is a threat of death against a citizen,” the boy said. “You want, I can take him to the magistrate.”

  “How would he pay the fine?” Marcus asked. “Leave him be. He’s having a bad day.”

  The house stood on a small, private square. The queensman at Marcus’s side was the only representative of the law. The men and women going into the house and hauling out the Kurtadam man’s things to the pile on the street were all Marcus’s. All Pyk’s. All the bank’s.

  A crowd had gathered. Neighbors and street merchants and whoev
er happened to be passing by. There was nothing like a crowd for drawing a crowd. Enen, the Kurtadam woman Marcus had hired as a guard when Cithrin first sent him out to build her branch, came out with a complex puppet cradled in her arms like a sleeping child. She laid it gently on the growing mound of things.

  “How can you do this?” the Kurtadam man shouted at her. “How can you do this to one of your own kind?”

  Enen ignored him and went back in. A Jasuru man—Hart, his name was—came out with a double handful of clothes. Silks and brocades, some of them. It wasn’t hard to see where the bank’s money had gone, but the collateral on the loan wasn’t tunics and hose. Wasn’t even the puppet works. It was rights to the house itself, and so now that the terms of default were in play, it was the house Marcus and his guards were taking. Yardem ducked out from under the low doorframe, a sewn mattress under his arm. The Kurtadam man burst into hopeless tears.

  From the crowd, a man laughed and started making false crying sounds of his own.

  “That’s the last of it, sir,” Yardem said. “We’ve started boarding it up. Making it secure.”

  “Thank you,” Marcus said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Kurtadam man was sitting on his mattress with his head in his hands. Sobs racked his body. Marcus squatted down beside him.

  “All right,” Marcus said. “So here’s what happens next. You’re going to be angry and you’re going to want to get back at us. Me, the bank, anyone. It’ll take a week, maybe more, to get past the worst of that, but in the meantime, you won’t be thinking things through. You’re going to tell yourself that burning the house is the right thing. If you can’t have it, no one can. Like that. Are you listening?”

  “Eat shit,” the man said between sobs.

  “I’ll take that for yes. So I’m going to leave some of my people here. They’ll be in the house and the street just to see to it that nothing interesting happens. If anyone comes into the house, they’ll kill them. If anyone tries to damage the house from the outside, they’ll hurt them badly. So don’t let’s dance that, all right?”

  Maybe it was the gentleness of the threat, but the Kurtadam man stopped long enough to nod. That was a good sign, at least.

  “I’m going to make you an offer now,” Marcus said. “I don’t mean any offense by it. It’s not the bank doing it, it’s me. You’ve got all this and no place for it. Your things are going to rot in the street. Won’t do you any good. I’ll give you thirty weight in silver for the whole thing, and you can walk away. Start over.”

  The tears were falling from the man’s eyes, beading on his oily, otter-fine fur like dewdrops.

  “Worth more,” he choked.

  “Not lying on the street, it’s not,” Marcus said.

  “I need my puppets. It’s how I live.”

  “You can keep three of the puppets, then. Same price.”

  Despair washed over the man’s expression as he looked at his chests and clothes, a great plaster vase with cut flowers wilting in it. The crowd looked on in amusement or false sympathy.

  “I was going to pay,” the man said softly.

  “You weren’t,” Marcus said. “And that’s all past now. Take your dolls and your silver, and go try again, all right?”

  The man nodded. More tears. Marcus pressed a wallet with the silver into the man’s hand.

  “All right, let’s load all this up except whichever three puppets he wants, and take it back to the warehouse.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yardem said. “And after?”

  “Bathhouse. I’m feeling a touch soiled.”

  * * *

  T

  he summer in Porte Oliva was a bandit. It hid behind the soft sea breeze and the long, comfortable evenings. It spoke in the friendly and reassuring tones of surf and birdcall. If at midday the sun felt like a hand pushing down against his shoulder, Marcus could still call it companionable. The attack would come—blazing days and sweat-filled nights. The Kurtadam would shave themselves back almost to stubble. The Firstblood and the Cinnae would abandon modesty in favor of comfort. The business of the day would stop just after midday, the city falling into fevered dreams until evening when the summer sun lost some of its violence.

  The attack wasn’t there yet. The spring was still lulling them all into lowering their guard. But it would come.

  Cithrin was over two weeks gone, and likely on the water between Sara-sur-Mar and Carse. The days without her had been made from the same cloth as those with—payments to deliver, the strongbox to watch, the payments to retrieve. Now and then, a client or partner would need a few swords to walk with someone or something. Now that Pyk’s role was uncontested, she seemed to calm a bit, but she still generated a dozen minor tasks that had to be done and complained at the money it cost to accomplish them. So in a sense, nothing had changed, and in a sense it all had.

  “I’m going to go after her,” Marcus said.

  Yardem sat forward, drinking his beer carefully. His silence was thoughtful and disapproving. Marcus leaned forward over the rough plank table. It wasn’t their customary taproom. Three young Jasuru boys, their scales bright as green-snakes, played drums in the yard, the complex rhythms making the air richer. Marcus took his bowl of beef and snow peas, looked at it, and put it down again.

  “I was thinking about coming from Vanai when Cithrin was passing herself as a boy,” he said.

  Yardem nodded.

  “You’d be in a dress then, sir?”

  “I could go in carter’s clothes. Or as a merchant. It isn’t as if I’d need to announce myself. Just ride in, stay quiet, and when she’s ready to come back I can travel with her then.”

  “Why?”

  “Not much point in staying hidden when I’m heading away, is there?”

  “I mean why would you go after her, sir? What’s the advantage?”

  “I’d think that was obvious. Keep her safe.”

  Yardem sighed.

  “What?” Marcus said. “Go ahead. You know you want to say it. Tell me she’s in no danger, and that Corisen Mout and Barth can keep her as safe as anyone. She’s heading toward a war. A real one, not one of the little shell games like who runs Maccia. She doesn’t understand how that kind of violence can spread. And you know that’s true.”

  “If you think three blades would make her safe where two won’t, why not send someone else, sir? Enen’s been to Carse.”

  Yardem’s dark eyes met his. Yardem’s ironic subservience had become such a habit over the years that Marcus sometimes forgot the hardness that could take the Tralgu’s features. In moments like this, it was easy to believe that the Tralgu had been bred for the hunt and the kill as well as a deadly kind of loyalty. Marcus silently hefted a few arguments, but under Yardem’s implacable gaze, they all seemed like felling a tree with a toenail knife.

  “You want her to be in trouble, sir, but she isn’t.”

  Marcus’s impatience shifted. He felt his own gaze cool.

  “Meaning what?”

  Yardem flicked an ear, the rings jingling, and turned back to his mug. When he started to lift it, Marcus put his palm over its mouth and pressed it back down to the table.

  “Asked you a question.”

  Yardem let go of the beer.

  “After Ellis, sir, you looked for revenge.”

  “I looked for justice.”

  “If you say so,” Yardem said, refusing to be turned. “I was with you for that. Not like we are now, but I was there. I saw it happen. You didn’t only kill Springmere. You planned it, you built it. You made sure that he could see his death coming, understood it, and couldn’t do anything to stop it. And when he was dead, you thought it would be better. Not fixed. You’re not stupid, but you thought that… justice… would redeem something. Only it didn’t.”

  “I am just certain you have an argument in this somewhere,” Marcus said. “Because I just know you aren’t hauling Alys and Merian out of their graves to score cheap points.”

  “I’m not,
sir,” Yardem said. There was nothing like apology in his voice. “I’m saying you didn’t only kill Springmere because he needed to die. You were looking for redemption.”

  “More of your religious—”

  “And you were looking to Cithrin for the same,” Yardem said, refusing to be silenced. “She was a girl and she was at the mercy of a merciless world. We helped her. Hatred didn’t bring you peace, and somewhere in your soul, you thought that love would. And here we are, Cithrin bel Sarcour saved, only you still don’t have the redemption you wanted. So you’re trying to tell yourself and everyone else that she still needs saving when she doesn’t. She’s fine, sir.”

  “I didn’t want to work for her,” Marcus said. “I wanted to walk away. You were the one who argued that we should go back. That was you.”

  “It was. But that was when she needed us.”

  “The way she doesn’t need us now?”

  “Yes, sir. The way she doesn’t now,” Yardem said, his voice going soft and gentle in a way that was worse than shouting. “We have steady work for fair pay. We have shelter and we have food. Interesting if that’s not what we were looking for.”

  “We spend our days taking people’s houses and throwing them out in the street. How’s that a way to live?”

  “Used to be, we’d kill them, sir,” Yardem said. “Not sure this is worse.”

  Marcus rose to his feet. The drumbeats throbbing out from the yard reached their crisis and collapsed. In the silence, Marcus’s voice was louder than he’d meant it to be.

  “You can pay for your own damn drinks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The other men and women in the taproom cleared space as he stalked out, eyes both wide and averted. If any of them had spoken to him, there would have been blows over it, but no one did. In the street, the evening sun was turning the high clouds to red and gold—blood and coins. The sky behind them seemed bluer by comparison. Marcus took himself back north, toward the Grand Market and the café, the barracks and the counting house. The puppeteers haunted the street corners, calling to the crowds for attention and coppers. When his anger had cooled from white to a dull and aching redness, Marcus stopped for a few minutes by one. It was a simple retelling of the usual PennyPenny the Jasuru. The main puppet was nicely made, painted to give the impression of scales, and used convincingly enough that the puppet seemed to have emotions of its own. Not that PennyPenny required much more than surprise, rage, and remorse. When the hero threw his wife and baby down a well, Marcus tossed a copper into the collecting bag and walked on.