“I don’t think you’re crazy,” Caliph said slowly. “I wanted to see you—” He forced himself to spit it out. “My reasons have changed for needing to see you. I guess . . . I suppose . . . I needed to remember. Everything is wrong. My uncle, my history, this war . . . I don’t like being king. I’m not even sure I like who I am.”
Cameron sipped his cup and winced. The milk was still hot. “There, you see? The Blue General can be wounded by hot milk.”
Caliph was glad to chuckle, anything to break the awful oppressiveness of their previous topic. “There’s a lesson there, I suppose.”
“Mmm.” Cameron nodded and swallowed. “The lesson is . . .” He held his cup aloft. “That the world is made up of very small things. This conversation for instance.”
He took a somewhat more cautious sip. “If you don’t like being king, run away.”
“What?”
Cameron nodded. “I’m serious, run away—you’re king, what are they going to do to you? It’s a small thing. A little choice you wake up in the morning and make. Pack a sandwich, walk out the gates and head in any direction you want. I did it once.”
“I can’t believe this is the advice you’re giving me.”
“It’s not advice,” Cameron corrected, setting his cup down with a clink. “It’s the way it is. You can just as easily stay. Every day you have the same choice, leave or stay. Either way, do what you have to. Don’t run this kingdom because you feel the weight of a million sheep farmers on your back. They will survive with or without you.”
“Tell that to the ghosts of Fallow Down.”
Cameron picked his cup back up. “Tell me, do you think you could have saved them?”
“I had no idea such a thing could even happen. It’s completely beyond anyone how or why—”
“That’s right. This kingdom will go on living and dying with or without you. Those farmers beyond the city wall are just as much alive as you are and they have their own ideas. They don’t sit around hanging on every word the High King speaks. A country is made up of millions of people who do what they please. They can manage. Buying. Trading. Feeding themselves.”
“They depend on me for protection.”
“They depend on the king—whoever he is,” Cameron said bluntly. “Not you. If you left tomorrow there would be a new king. This kingdom will not fold up and blow away if you walk out that gate. These people are too stubborn for that.”
“You think I should go?”
“I am telling you that nothing in this life is big enough to imprison you. You decide.” He downed the rest of his milk. “Who’s the girl?”
The shadow in the doorway drew back, then paused.
Caliph did not see it and asked, “A servant didn’t see you in?”
Cameron poured himself another half-cup. “An armed squad of soldiers saw me in. The woman I met in the hall was no servant.”
Caliph sank back into the cushions with a faint sound.
Cameron cleared his throat. “Never mind. The High King’s business is his own.”
“No, it’s all right. The whole city’s gossiping. They think I’m as bad as my uncle. According to rumor we prowl the graveyards at night and mate in the mausoleums when Lewlym is full.”
Cameron smiled and nodded as if this too were news he had already heard. Caliph wondered if Cameron had taken his time coming to the castle so that he might arrive armed with every bit of gossip, already informed of how the Duchy squared.
“She seems . . . pleasant.”
Caliph picked up his goblet and took a sip. “Her name is Sena. She’s dangerous. And I love her.” He tilted his goblet all the way back.
Cameron smiled faintly. “Love asks no questions. But a king should. If you decide you want to be king.”
“Gadriel would like you,” Caliph mused. “The seneschal,” he explained. He pressed the cork into the bottle.
“He must like balding goatherds.” Cameron grinned.
The shadow in the doorway slipped away.
CHAPTER 24
One of those interminable midsummer months without holiday, Streale came in swullocking and threatened more heat before autumn finally drained it like an insatiable leech.
Beneath smazy yellow skies, the city continued to seep fermenting juices from its cracked and crusted hide. Strange urban smells lifted with the trill of popple bugs from city parks crammed under aqueducts or wedged between museums and tattoo parlors.
The economy crawled along like a half-butchered thing, cowed and wounded by the encroaching war. Grocers ran out of canned meat and powdered milk and chemiostatic torches. Construction workers abandoned the skeletons of new buildings whose funding had gone slack.
Despite the unrest, Sena needed to get out of the castle. The Hold was still relatively safe. She dressed in simple clothes and took a full purse of money.
Accompanied by two watchmen in casual attire she sampled fruits, pawed through racks of outlandish clothing and drank coffee at a chocolate house on King’s Road.
On a whim, maybe to spite Megan, she decided to try one of the bright dyes she had seen in cafes and bookshops in Octul Box.
There were pinks and flame orange-reds and deep purples to choose from.
After a stylish cut she settled on blue, just a stripe. When the beautician was done a single whip the color of sky lashed from Sena’s crown down along the side of her cheek. It matched her eyes perfectly.
srym T
.
She couldn’t explain how it had disappeared and reappeared any more than she could explain how the Wllin Droul knew she had it. Everyone assumed the attack on Isca Castle had been an attempt on the High King’s life, an effort at a coup. But Sena knew the real motive behind the onslaught and her knowledge made her danger and her fear hugely personal and close.
If she hadn’t been unbearably weary of the castle she wouldn’t have risked the outing in Octul Box. But she
Humid warm and strangely sweet, the smells of pollution cloyed in alleys trickling away through the Hold where fourteen-year-olds bragged about theft, sex, violence and their evasion of the law. They carved at their egos with knives, whittled heroic icons of themselves from the flesh of their rivals.
They ogled Sena like meat.
Sena’s Hjolk-trull heritage kept her physically analogous to their age. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three. Not that it mattered. She turned plenty of heads regardless of age.
The boys followed her all day, slipping over walls, staying a safe distance from her bodyguards.
She watched them furtively as she went about her shopping. The papers had brought them to her attention. Some called them lice; Sena could tell from their bold propositioning stares that they did not read the papers.
