of the Medean bank, barked out a laugh, and Cithrin let herself breathe again.
“Bring her a chair, and pass me those reports,” he said. She put the sealed books into his hand. He was a bigger man than he’d seemed at first. He broke the seals and opened the ledgers, reading the ciphered text as easily as if it had been simple letters. “All right, Magistra. Let’s see how you’re doing. So far.”
Geder
As a boy, even a young man, Geder had imagined what it would be like to be king. His daydreams had seemed perfectly benign at the time. If he were king, men like Sir Alan Klin would be called to heel. If he were king, he would see that the libraries of Camnipol—of all Antea and its holdings—were well stocked and maintained. If he were king he would command any woman he wanted to his bed, and no one would laugh at him or reject him or comment on the size of his belly. They had been the sort of fantasies a young man could have safely, without any threat that they might one day come true.
Except, of course, that they had.
Now he woke in the mornings with a dozen servants already standing around his bed. There was the ritual humiliation of being bathed and dressed. He understood that it was all meant as a show of dignity. The Lord Regent of Antea was not a man who put on his own clothing, who shaved his own chin, who laced his own boots. He submitted to being helped up from his bed, to having his night clothes taken from him and standing naked for that terrible moment until other men’s hands pulled fresh undergarments over his body. He could not bathe without his body servants attending him. Or perhaps he could, but it would have meant ordering them away, and ordering them away would have been admitting that it bothered him to have them see him undressed. And once he admitted that it bothered him, then every time it had happened up until now became shameful in retrospect.
He should have refused the very first time, but he hadn’t known then, and now it was too late. He was trapped by what had come before into enduring what was inevitably going to come next.
As to the idea of asking a woman to bed with him, he’d have died first. There was no doubt—
Once he’d gotten through the worst of it, though, the breakfast was always brilliant, and the mornings until midday he spent in the personal library reading ancient books and working on his translations. Or else he would visit Aster and they’d mock his tutors together. Usually his awareness of the great cloud of servants would diminish over time until they almost seemed to be there for their own reasons, and Geder stopped feeling quite so much onstage.
The Kingspire itself seemed constantly implausible. Dur ing his time in court, Geder had been to a few of its great halls, but living in it he began to see the place less as a build ing and more like a great insects’ mound like something out of Southling fairy tales. The walls were only apparently solid. Most were crisscrossed with servants’ passages and hidden ways. A thin, dingy hallway might loop through the basements only to open into a vast private bathhouse with indigo tiles and heated water steaming down in a waterfall. There were listener’s holes everywhere—under benches, hidden inside archways—where an eavesdropper might be placed.
There was even an entire chamber that was built as a massive dumbwaiter and ready to haul the king and his guests up to the greatest heights of the spire without the trouble of being carried up stairs to get there. All the air was perfumed. All the conservatories stood ready with musicians to play at the king’s command, or in Geder’s case, the regent’s. He constantly felt as though he was living inside someone else’s idea of who he should be, and it left him feeling a bit tentative. Unless, of course, Basrahip was with him. The priest was a steadying presence.
“Little change, Lord Regent,” Lord Daskellin said as he stepped across the war chamber.
Wider than a dueling field, the floor of the room had been covered in soil and sod all formed and shaped to match the geography of Asterilhold and western Antea. Geder’s working desk stood near the wall where Camnipol would have been. The promontory on which the city stood was a little step down. The mountains dividing Asterilhold from the Dry Wastes came up almost to his knees. The northern coast was bordered by tiny blue beads poured out until the false sea met the walls like running into the edge of the world.
Canl Daskellin stepped across the fields of Asterilhold, over the great knot of armies playing stop-me-stop- you in the marshes of the south, then the Siyat and the arrayed army crouched around the Seref Bridge. The only changes since the day before were the positions of the ships on the sea of beads, and really only four of those were significant.
“Good morning, my lord,” Basrahip said.
“Minister,” Daskellin replied, and both men seemed pleased to leave the conversation there.
“I haven’t had word from Lord Kalliam,” Geder said. “Something could have happened in the south, still.”
“Could,” Daskellin said, and his tone finished the sentence.
Geder hated the vague apology in his own voice, but Canl Daskellin had been King Simeon’s Protector of Northport, among other things. Growing up, men like Daskellin and Bannien, Issandrian and Maas had been the great lights of the court. Now that Geder was Lord Regent, Daskellin paid court, and still Geder always had the feeling of being the junior when the man was in the room. That he had recalled Daskellin from the field and was prepared to command him again now only made the awkwardness more profound.
“I was thinking,” Geder said, rising from his desk, walking gently to avoid crushing his own forces camped near the Seref, “that we could build a second bridge. I read an essay about Koort Mahbi, the third Regos of Borja? He had a moving bridge designed with little boats on the supports. The way he did it, his army could push the bridge out over a river, and then move across it, and pull it up on the other side. There and then gone again. If we made one like that we could go to the river over here.” He touched the ground where the Siyat curved. “We wouldn’t be near a good road, but even overland, I don’t think we’d be more than three days from Kaltfel.”
“It’s a thought,” Daskellin said. “There’s still the problem of getting enough men onto the far side. If Kalliam had managed to get us both sides of the Seref, there would have been a protected place for the troops to gather. A movable bridge like that? If it’s not wide enough to bring a large number of men across at once, a couple of dozen bowmen could kill our full army a few men at a time.”
“But Kalliam says they can’t move in the marshlands,” Geder said.
“And he’s right. The reason Asterilhold and Antea split when the High Kings died was that river, the runoff from the mountains, and the mud between the two.”
Geder cleared his throat.
“That’s why I want you to go to Northcoast.” Daskellin looked up at him now. Geder wasn’t sure, but he thought there was a hint of pleasure in the man’s expression. “The gap between the mountain ranges there and there is hilly and it’s got about a thousand little holdfasts and garrisons, but if King Tracian were to move a force to his border, Asterilhold would have to draw men back from the south to keep them from invading, yes?”
Daskellin paced the room to the fields of Ellis and looked back. He stroked his chin.
“It’s possible, yes,” he said.
Geder glanced over to Basrahip, who nodded. A small, relieved smile drew Geder’s lips wider.
“He doesn’t actually have to invade, even,” Geder said. “If he’s just there looking as if he might…”
“Have you told the Lord Marshal about this idea?”
“Ah. No. Why? Should I?”
Daskellin shrugged.
“Dawson doesn’t like involving other kingdoms in Antean affairs. I think he finds having allies undignified. But yes, I have friends and contacts in Northcoast. Not all of them are in the court. I’m not sure what the situation is there, but I can find out. Where’s Bannien?”
“Lord Bannien’s holding Anninfort,” Geder said. “Kalliam thought there was too much chance of a fresh rebellion. His sons are with the larger army. When can you be on your way?”
“As soon as you’d like.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Geder said. “I’ve sent to Lord Skestinin. He’ll have a ship ready to take you, provided Asinport hasn’t broken the blockade. But Skestinin doesn’t think it will have.”
