to command. To control. He would be protector of the realm, of Antea, of the boy Aster. He would be regent, and so in practice, he would be king, and Antea would answer to his will.
He didn’t hear Basrahip come out, not because the big priest was being quiet, but because Geder’s mind was only halfway in his body. The other half pulled between euphoria and panic.
“Prince Geder?”
The wide face was concerned. Geder sat on the steps. The stone still held some of the day’s heat. Basrahip gathered up the hem of his robes and sat at Geder’s side. For a long moment, the two men sat silently, like children tired at the end of the day looking out into a back alley.
“The king’s going to die,” Geder said. “And I’m going to take his place.”
The priest’s smile was serene.
“The goddess favors you,” he said. “This is how the world is for those who have her blessing.”
Geder turned back. The breeze passed ripples through the dark banner, and a passing dread touched him.
“She’s not… I mean, the goddess isn’t killing the king for me? Is she?”
Basrahip laughed low and warm.
“This is not her way. The world is made from little lives and little deaths because she wills it this way. No, she does not make the waves, she only puts her chosen in the place where they are borne always up by them. She is subtle and she is sure.”
“All right. Good. I just wouldn’t want Aster to lose his father in order for things to go well for me.” Geder lay back, resting his spine against the steps. “I’m going to have to tell him. I don’t know how to do that. How do you tell a boy that his father’s dying?”
“Gently,” Basrahip said.
“And the ambassador from Asterilhold? The one who wanted me to talk the king into a private audience? Now it looks as if I’m going to be the one taking that audience.”
“I will be with you,” Basrahip said.
“The king told me what he wants, though, so at least I know what I’m supposed to do. With that one. And there’ll be people who help me. The regent has advisors just like the king. It won’t be like Vanai where everyone wanted me to fail,” Geder said. A fragment of dream slipped up from the back of his mind. The flames of Vanai danced before him again, silhouetting a single, desperate figure. The voice of the fire roared, and Geder felt the guilt and horror freshly for a moment before he locked it away again. He was the hero of Antea. What happened in Vanai was a good thing. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger. “It won’t be like Vanai.”
“As you say.”
Geder chuckled.
“Alan Klin’s going to shit himself when he hears,” he said with a grin.
“What are you supposed to do?” Basrahip asked.
“Hmm?”
“The ambassador.”
“Oh. Simeon wants me to keep Aster safe and make peace with King Lechan. I told him I would.”
“Ah,” Basrahip said. And a moment later, “And when you cannot do both, which will you choose?”
Marcus
From the fall of dragons to the days still to come, all things human were made and determined by structures made by something greater and crueler. The great monuments were perhaps the least important. The unreachable tower at the center of Lake Esasmadde, the Grave of Dragons in Carse, the Empty Keep. They could inspire fear or awe, they could call forth a sense of mystery, but the greater power lay in the prosaic. The dragon’s roads crossed the nations, and where they met, cities grew, fed by the traffic and advantage that good roads brought. The thirteen races were also constrained by the will of the great masters who had first created them. The Cinnae were thin and pale, unsuited for battle, and so confined themselves to the well-defended hills and valleys of Princip C’Annalde. Tralgu and Jasuru and Yemmu, bred for violence and formed for war, found their homes in the Keshet where the plains gave no natural barrier against invaders and whatever war won in a given season proved impossible to defend in the next. Where the landscape called for war, the races most suited to war prospered. Where it allowed shelter from violence, those in need of shelter came. The mark of the dragons had been on the world from the beginning of history, and would be until the end of all things.
The mark was there, but it was not changeless.
Around every great city fed by paths of dragon’s jade, there were others—townships, hamlets, some little more than waystations—where the roads were paved by human hands. Where the great roads met, and the great cities grew, the farmlands were, over the course of centuries, used up. The richer soil farther away grew in value, and new places— peculiarly human places—were born.
And as the landscape changed, so did humanity, straining at the bindings woven into its blood. The races were unmistakable and unmixed only in the minds of the people. True, not all races could interbreed. A Cinnae woman could no more bear to a Yemmu man than a rat terrier could whelp a mastiff, and there were other combinations of blood that gave no offspring, or whose issue were themselves sterile. The difficulty of bearing a mixed-breed child allowed the thirteen races to stand apart from one another, but considered carefully, no race but the Drowned was pure. A Tralgu with wider-set, darker eyes might have Southling blood somewhere generations back. Secret marriages between Haaverkin and Jasuru could take place. Between Firstblood and Cinnae, such pairings were merely distasteful and scandalous. History was also marked by less pleasant pairings, and not all women who suffered rape at the hands of enemy soldiers could bring themselves to slaughter the babes that came of the crime.
The history of the races was a complex tissue of love and revulsion, landscape and design, war and trade, secrets and indiscretions. Cithrin bel Sarcour was only one example in Marcus’s broad experience. The man who sat across the low wooden table from him was another. Capsen Gostermak was the child of a Jasuru mother and a Yemmu father. His skin was pocked where the bronze scales of his mother’s race never fully formed and his jaw was crowded with pointed, vicious teeth that were as unlike the Yemmu tusks as Jasuru teeth. He looked like a monster from a children’s story, neither one thing nor another, but entirely built to fight. No one who didn’t know the man would have guessed that he styled himself a poet or that he raised doves.
The house was stone and mortar near the center of Cemmis township. In the falling twilight outside, Capsen’s sons played in among the other children of the township, kicking the body of a dead rat around the base of the dovecote, shrieking with the glee that comes of disgust and the heart-lessness of boys.
“There is a place,” the half-breed said. “It’s not nearby, but it’s not far either. A cove that people don’t go to.”
“Can you guide us there?”
“No,” Capsen said. “I will tell you where to look, but I have a family. This isn’t any business of mine.”
Marcus glanced up at the doorway. Yardem Hane leaned against the stone frame, arms crossed and expression unreadable. It was half a day back to Porte Oliva along a road that followed the shore. Marcus didn’t like both of them being away from the bank and its safebox, but Yardem had insisted that he not come alone. Outside, a child screamed in what could have been pain or joy.
“All right,” Marcus said. “Two weights of silver for a map. Another two if our pirates are there when we get there.”
“Paying me to talk and paying me to keep quiet?”
“You win both ways,” Marcus said.
Capsen rose and walked to the cupboard. It was made from wood that the tide brought to the beach, and it left the room smelling faintly of tar and salt. As Marcus watched, he reached to the top shelf and brought down a bit of parchment a bit wider than Marcus’s hand. Dark ink marked it.
He put it on the table and Marcus picked it up. The curve of the coastline was unmistakable, and four good landmarks were already drawn in and labeled. The man had been prepared. That was either a very good thing or a bad one. If the township was ready to help him against the pirates, it made recovering the cargo more likely. If
