The King's Blood Read online

  “They knew,” Dawson said. “Not the details, but they knew something was planned. They were ready for us.”

  “Stop talking,” she said. “This will hurt.”

  She poured the wine into the cut on his side, and Dawson arched back, sucking in his breath. He did not scream. She did the same again with the other cut. His breath grew ragged. With his shirt gone and some, at least, of the blood washed away, she could see a dozen angry red welts all down his right side and out along his arm. They didn’t bleed, but the skin around them was hot to the touch and tight as a drum.

  “What happened here?” she asked as she prepared to honey the wounds. “Spiders,” Dawson said. “That mad bastard cultist must have been carrying a sack of them under his robes. And soon as I cut him, they came boiling out.”

  “You cut him,” she said. It was neither a question nor a statement, but something between.

  “If I’d meant to, he’d be dead,” Dawson said as she slathered the honey over the lower of his cuts and pressed her cloth to it. “I was trying for Palliako.”

  With her free hand, Clara pressed palm to mouth, only realizing after that she’d bloodied her own face. Dawson drew her hand away from the cut and pressed down on it himself. It was still bleeding, though not quite as badly.

  “You,” she began, then tried again. “You tried to slaughter the Lord Regent? That’s what this was all about?”

  “Of course it was. Palliako didn’t give me an option. I did and Lord Bannien and Alan Klin and a few others besides. This wasn’t done alone or for glory. We’re fighting to save the throne from those foreign bastards Palliako’s wedded himself to. Only somehow they knew we were coming. The guards were on alert. It should never have been me holding the blade to start with, but they couldn’t reach the high table. Not in time.”

  Clara’s heart darkened. If there was a way to save this, to make it right again, she didn’t know it. She could only hope that they would win, and even that was thin comfort.

  “What happened to him? Does Palliako still live?”

  “I don’t know. When I tried to take him, the bastard priest got in my way, and then the personal guard was at my heels. One of the others may have caught him, but I didn’t. Stop. Enough.”

  He sat up. The cuts still bled, though less freely. Wine stained his skin more deeply than the film of drying blood, and the honey shined on him. He was old. The hair on his chest was more grey than black now, and his forehead was high where the hairline had begun to retreat. His sword was still in his hand. She wondered if she had anything to salve a spider’s bite, and what sort of spiders a priest carried with him into an ambush.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked, proud of herself that the question came out sounding like matter of planning and not a cry of despair.

  “We do what we have to,” Dawson said. “We win. There are forces on our side. Allies. We have to gather them and defend ourselves. We have to find Aster.”

  “Find him? He’s lost?”

  “He is. Once it was done, we were going to throw down our blades right there and surrender to him, but…”

  “But now the palaces are thick with violence, and the prince, who was in the middle of it all, is missing,” Clara said. “God. Dawson, how could you have done this?”

  “It’s my duty. And however badly it’s played out, the risk was worth taking,” he said, his expression closing. He shifted to the edge of the table and let himself down. “I’ll want something to wrap this with. And a fresh shirt.”

  “Stay here,” Clara said. “I’ll bring them.”

  She walked through her own house like it was an unknown country. The papered walls, the glowing oil lamps, the rich tapestries that hung from the walls. All of it had taken on the too-sharp sense of something from dreams. The servants were gone, and with no one to help her, she chose two shirts from Dawson’s wardrobe. One was pale yellow to shred and use as bandages. The other was a dark blue that neared black so that when the wounds wept, the blood wouldn’t show so clearly. Outside the bedroom window, she saw three men she knew—the cook’s boy, the footman with the unfortunate ears, and the farrier’s assistant. They stood clumped together like birds in the cold despite the warm night air. They held blades and hammers, pretending with their postures to know the use of them. Clara closed the shutter before she walked away.

  Jorey was in the kitchen when she returned to it. His hair was in disarray, the leathers he’d worn to war hung halflaced from his shoulders. He’d started to affect a beard, but it was still only stubble; a shadow across his cheeks no light dispelled. As she stepped in, her son looked up at her. The distance in his eyes was terrible to see.

  “Help me bind him up,” Clara said, forcing a smile into the words. “Your father’s a dear man and always has been, but I won’t have him leaking on the floors.”

  Dawson chuckled if Jorey didn’t. They stood at the wide table and tore the pale shirt into strips, the cloth parting under her fingers, threads ripping apart.

  “Bannien’s got the most men,” Dawson said, carrying on a conversation they’d already begun, “but his estate’s not defensible. Too open, too many low hedges a man could vault. Klin’s isn’t as good as Mastellin’s, but until we know how word of this leaked, we can’t trust the men I’ve trusted.”

  “But you can trust Klin?”

  “He wouldn’t take Palliako’s side if he was on fire and Geder had the only water in the world. Strange as it is, Klin’s the only man I feel certain I can rely on now.”

  She prodded at Dawson’s elbow to make him lift it, then laid the strips of pale cloth against his injured skin. Her fingers seemed to know what to do without her direction. Just as well, since her mind was a whirlwind and no two thoughts within it connecting to each other. When she needed to get around back to tie the bandaging down, Jorey held the cloth for her, and she had the sudden, powerful memory of helping her sister wash their father’s body for burial. The thickness in her throat was as unwelcome as undeniable.

  “I’ll go to him,” Jorey said. “If you think it’s best.”

  “No,” Dawson said. “Send a runner. You take Sabiha and your mother. Get them to safety.”

  “And what makes you think I would consent to go anywhere?” Clara asked tartly. “Last I saw, this was still my home.”

  The last of the bandages in place, she reached for the darker shirt. Dawson caught her hand. She couldn’t say which of them was trembling.

  “If you stay, Jorey will,” Dawson said, “and if he does, the girl will too. I’m not defeated, but I can’t both fight this battle and keep eyes on all of you. If you’re all here, I will keep eyes on you. Won’t be able to stop.”

  “You would have to,” Clara began, and the words choked her. She swallowed. “You would have to believe that there’s someplace safer than here.”

  “Jorey will take you out of the city. And when this is done, he will bring you back.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked, but they both knew it wasn’t a question he could answer. She kissed him sharply on the forehead: love and anger. “Let me gather a few things. Jorey, get your wife.”

  H

  orses and carriages would have been fastest, but they would also have called the most attention to them. Instead Clara and Sabiha wore dark cloaks with the hoods drawn up. Jorey walked in front wearing his leather and a sword at his side. Uncharitably, she wished now that she hadn’t sent Vincen Coe away. An additional sword either here with her or at the mansion guarding Dawson’s back would have been welcome. In the north, fires were burning.

  The city was transformed. The wide streets seemed dangerous, too open and leaving someone too easily seen. The shadows called to Clara, promising protection in their obscuring darkness. From the way that Sabiha walked close to her, she guessed the girl felt the same. These dark buildings and blackcobbled streets weren’t the city they’d lived in, but someplace unknown, unsafe, and malign wearing a mask of their home.

 
They reached the square where in daylight farmers would sell their goods to the servants of the great houses on the western side of the Division. The smell of rotting leaves in the gutters marked where the last day’s fallen greens had been bruised into muck. Across the way, a crowd of men strode into the square, torches held high above their head. Without so much as a word, Clara and Jorey stepped into the alcove of a little shop, pulling Sabiha along after them. The torchlight seemed too bright; it hurt to look at too closely. The men were shouting to each other, rough voices drunk with violence and wine. They were going back the way Clara had just come. Toward the mansion and Dawson. Clara squinted, trying to make out the colors the men wore, trying to guess whether these were allies come to reinforce the position or enemies ready to kill and loot and burn. She couldn’t tell, and she didn’t dare go closer.

  When the last of them had passed, Jorey snuck out and Clara and Sabiha followed. Sabiha took Clara’s hand and wouldn’t let it go. Clara pulled the girl close. Somewhere to their right, a woman was screaming. If the city guard was in the street tonight, Clara saw no sign of them. The woman stopped suddenly, and Clara could only tell herself that someone had come to her aid; she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

  Halfway to the western gate, they came to a barricade in the street. Tables, chairs, crates, and a wide overturned cart. There were men on both sides of the obstruction. She couldn’t tell if it was meant to stop people like her trying to escape to the countryside or to block soldiers and thugs coming into the city. The men wore no uniforms. The pennants of no houses flew. If war was a violence conducted with rules and traditions on a field of honor, then this was not war, but something worse.

  “What do we do?” Clara asked in a whisper.

  “Come with me,” Jorey said.

  The back alley was filthy, but Clara couldn’t bring her self to care. If the hem of her-cloak dragged through the gore of a slaughterhouse, it would only be what the night called for. Etiquette and delicate sensibilities had their place, but it was not here. Jorey was craning his neck, looking up it seemed at the night sky as if the stars might sweep down to carry them away. His small grunt of pleasure caught her attention.

  “What?” she asked.

  “That roof,” he said, pointing at a single-storied taphouse with its lights doused and its shutters locked. “If I lift you up, can you get onto it?”

  Clara looked at the structure. It had been decades since she’d been a little girl climbing where she wasn’t wanted. And even then it had for the most part been trees.

  “I can try,” she said.

  “Good,” Jorey said.

  They lifted Sabiha up first, and then Jorey lifted Clara into Sabiha’s waiting hands. He scrambled up last. Gesturing in silence, he led them along the rooftop to an alcove where a rough wooden ladder hid in the darkness.

  “If you go up here,” Jorey whispered, “there’s a place where we can lay the ladder across the alleyway and get past that barricade. Providing they don’t look up.”

  “I am beginning to think I raised you poorly,” Clara said, but she took herself up the ladder. From the top of the second story, the street looked very far away. The men at the barricade laughed with each other, joking in a way that made the fear and tension in them clearer than sunlight. Sabiha clambered up at Clara’s side while Jorey knelt and began lifting the ladder one rung at a time.

  Clara looked out over the city. Her city. There were more columns of smoke, but the one nearest the Kingspire was beginning to fade. Either someone had organized a fire team or the building set alight was exhausted of everything but stone. Far away, the walls of the city were dotted with torches and the low half moon seemed about to rest its head on the western gate.

  The western gate.

  “Stop,” Clara said. “You can put the ladder back down.”

  “No, it will work,” Jorey said. “I know it doesn’t seem sturdy, but I’ve done this before. It was a bet we used to make when I was—”

  “The gates are shut,” Clara said. “Someone’s sealed the city.”

  Jorey appeared at her side. The wall of the city wasn’t so far from them. In daylight and sanity, she could have walked from the street below them to the huge gates in only a few

  minutes. Even in the darkness, there was no question that the wide bronze doors had been closed. Closed and likely dropped from their hinges, as they would be in time of war.

  “We’re trapped,” Sabiha whispered.

  “We are,” Clara agreed.

  Marcus

  I

  t was raining in Porte Oliva when the reports came, the kind of flooding summer storm that began in the morning as a scent on the wind under a perfect blue sky and by mid-day was squalling against the streets and walls. It turned the streets into ankle-deep Rivers And Washed The Trash And Shit and dead animals from their hidden corners and out to the sea. Marcus struggled against the wind, but he didn’t run. Roach had brought word that Pyk needed him at the counting house. Within a minute of stepping outside, he’d been soaked as wet as it was possible to be. Running now seemed pointless.

  The tulips in their bowl were vivid red. Several of the petals were lost, and as he came close, a gust of screaming wind whipped another free. Marcus watched it spin away on the surface of the flood: a tiny scarlet boat on a vast river. He pushed his way through the door.

  Pyk was pacing the room. Sweat beaded on her wide fore-head, but rain had cooled the room to the point that she could at least move. Yardem sat on a tall stool smelling like wet dog and looking at least as drenched as Marcus. No one else was present.

  “Bird came this morning,” Pyk said without preamble. “Sent from the holding company.”

  “Good it didn’t wait for afternoon,” Marcus said, wringing out his cuffs. “Did they decide to send a fresh auditor?”

  “Other people are going to start getting word of this in the next day or two, so we’re going to have to move quickly. There’s trouble in Antea. According to our man in Camnipol, someone tried to stick the Lord Regent full of knife-sized holes. They’ve closed the gates, and there’s been fighting in the streets ever since. Odds-on bet is civil war.”

  The words took a moment to resolve. Yardem’s wide brown eyes were on him, watching him understand.

  “I have a list of the contracts I want placed,” Pyk said, “but it has to be done today. Once the word goes out, the prices on grain and metalwork are going to head toward the sky. We may only have hours to do this, and so of course, this is the day we can wash all the ink off a piece of paper just by walking it down to the corner. God hates me, but we’ll do what we can.”

  “What about Cithrin?” Marcus said.

  Pyk scowled. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “The note doesn’t say. The chop is Paerin Clark’s, so he’s the one making report. She’s not mentioned.”

  “But she’s in Camnipol,” Marcus said, his voice growing hard. “She’s with him.”

  “She went there, but I don’t know how she stands. Safe, dead, or missing, he wouldn’t have spent space on the page for word of her. This isn’t gossip. It’s what will make us coin. He sent us what we need to help the bank, and now it’s ours to follow his lead.”

  “I’m going for her,” Marcus said. “You can work the contracts yourself.”

  “God’s sake, Wester,” Pyk said, “it’s Camnipol. It’s weeks from here on a fast boat and more over land. By the time you got there, it would all be done. Even the bird’s not going to tell us what’s happening there now. Maybe it’s resolved. Maybe the whole place is burned flat. Either way, our work’s here.”

  “I don’t accept that,” Marcus said.

  “I don’t accept being the only good-looking woman in a city full of bendy little twig men,” Pyk said, “but it doesn’t change the situation. The magistra’s in Camnipol and we’re here. If you want to take care of her, take care of the things that matter to her. And while you’re at it, do what you’re paid for.”

&
nbsp; Pyk lifted a handful of papers. Contracts. Letters of enquiry and agreement. Yardem cleared his throat and Marcus forced himself to take his hand off the pommel of his sword. For a moment, the only sounds were the rush of water and the howl of wind. Pyk walked across the room and held out the papers. Slowly, half against his will, Marcus took them.

  “This is dangerous work,” Pyk said. “No one sees these except you and Ears.”

  “Ears?”

  “She means me, sir.”

  “Ah.”

  “Nothing else you’re doing matters compared to this,” Pyk said. “Manage it well, and we’ll have enough profit to keep this place afloat the rest of the year. All of the contracts have the names of the people I want them going to. Don’t put them in anyone else’s hands. And get it done now.”

  Marcus paged through the contracts. He nodded.

  “We have something dry to carry them in?” he asked.

  Yardem stood. He held a leather satchel in one hand and a broad oilskin envelope in the other. Marcus took them, folding contracts into envelope and envelope into satchel. Pyk folded her arms, her eyes black and narrow and satisfied.

  “Don’t cock this up,” she said.

  “We’ll do what needs doing,” Marcus said. “Yardem?”

  “Coming, sir.”

  Marcus stepped into the storm. The raindrops cut at his face and stung his eyes. Yardem padded along beside him.

  “Ears?”

  “I think she’s taking a liking to me, sir.”

  “Well, you’re a charming man. I have to stop by the barracks. Come with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The city was blurred, as if the water could wash away not only objects but lines and color themselves. As if the idea of Porte Oliva was dissolving. In the barracks, a dozen guardsmen were sitting in a rough circle playing at dice. Marcus considered them. He’d hired every person in his company except Yardem. They were good people. Solid men and women, loyal to the bank and to him personally.