The King's Blood

already a hard wad of tobacco stuffed into it, ready for the fire.

“In your withdrawing room,” Sabiha said. “Just as you thought. I’ve been listening to your grandson. He’s a beautiful child.”

“He is. Takes after his mother that way. She was always a pretty child, even when she was growing half a hand a year and looked like a blade of grass come to life, she wore it well. And he doesn’t sleep any more than she did. I’ll tell you a secret. Watching your children struggle with the same things you did when they were babes is a grandmother’s revenge.”

Sabiha smiled. It wasn’t obvious that she’d been weeping. Only a little redness about the eyes and a tiny, fading blotchiness at the throat. The girl was lucky that way. Being able to hide tears was a gift. But now a fresh shining came to her. Clara pursed her lips.

“Sometimes,” Sabiha said, “and it isn’t often, but sometimes I think of how the world could have been if I hadn’t been Lord Skestinin’s daughter.”

“Ah, but you always were,” Clara said, trying to keep the girl from going down the path she was headed. The girl wouldn’t be turned.

“I know. It’s just there are freedoms women have when they aren’t what we are. There are struggles too, I understand that. But there are ways to shape a life even within those, and then maybe—”

“No,” Clara said.

Sabiha’s tears welled, but did not fall. Not yet.

“No,” Clara said again, more gently. “You can’t think of that child. You can’t even wish for him back. It isn’t fair to ask everyone else to forget and only you remember. It doesn’t work like that.”

“I miss him, though,” Sabiha whispered. “I can’t just stop missing him.”

“You can stop showing that you do. Jorey has risked a great deal to give you another life. Another beginning. If you didn’t want it, you should have refused him. Accepting him and also keeping hold of the past isn’t fair. And it isn’t wise.”

“I’m sorry,” Sabiha said, her voice thick. “He was my boy. I thought you would understand.”

“I do. And that’s why I’m saying this. Look up. Look at me. No, at me. Look at me. Yes.”

Sabiha swallowed, and Clara felt the beginnings of tears in her own eyes. There was a boy out there—a child—whose mother loved him enough to break her heart, and he would never know it. Perhaps it was fair to the girl. She’d at least made a decision, even if the punishment seemed too much for the lapse. But the child was blameless. He was blameless, and he would suffer, and Clara would do what she could to see that the estrangement between mother and son was permanent, and that Sabiha’s old scandals were all kept in the past where they belonged. A tear tracked down Sabiha’s cheek, and Clara’s matched it.

“Good,” Clara said. “Now smile.”

Cithrin

The last Dragon Emperor slept before her. Each jade scale was as wide as her open palm. The eyelids were slit open enough to show a thin sliver of bronze eye. The folded wings were as long as the spars of a roundship. Longer. Cithrin tried to imagine the statue coming to life. Moving. Speaking in the languages that had made the world.

On one hand, the bulk and beauty and implicit physical power of the thing was humbling. The claws could have ripped a building apart. The mouth, had it opened, would have fit a steer. But size alone didn’t define it. The sculptor had also managed to capture a sense of the intellect and rage and despair in the shape of the dragon’s eyes and the angle of its flanks. Morade, the mad emperor against whom his clutch-mates had rebelled. Morade, whom Drakkis Storm-crow schemed against. Morade, whose death was the emancipation of all the races of humanity.

At her side, Lauro Medean scratched his arm.

“They say that the dragons could sleep as long as stone when they wanted to,” he said. “It was part of the war. The dragons would bury themselves or put themselves in deep caves. Hidden. And then when the armies had their back or flank, the dragons would spring back to life. Come boiling up out of the ground. Slaughter everybody.”

Komme Medean’s son was a year older than her, but he acted much younger. He shared his father’s brown skin and dark hair, and when she looked carefully, she could see where the young man’s face would broaden, his jowls sink, and he would look even more like Komme. She wondered how old a man had to be before gout took him. He smiled at her.

“You want to go inside?”

“I’ve come a long way not to,” she said.

Coming to Carse, the thing she’d worried about least was the journey. Bandits, pirates, illness, wildcats. She knew of them all, and understood the risks of them better than most. Her work from childhood had been to understand risk. In a journey of a thousand miles taken by a hundred ships, about how many would be lost. In summer. In winter. Along the coast. Crossing the blue water to Far Syramys. How often caravans were killed or simply vanished. The actuarial tables were in her mind, and more than that the tools with which the tables were built. She could estimate chance better than a gambler, and so the journey held no terror.

The handing over of the reports had been worse. She knew that the branch was doing well, but not what would be well enough, or what the other branches were doing, or how her improvised branch in Porte Oliva affected the greater strategies of the holding company. It wasn’t risk that frightened her, but the inability to figure it, to place a number against it. To be unknown was worse than to be dangerous.

And of all the things that had kept her from sleep in the long weeks since she’d left Porte Oliva, the worst was this: how would she manage to stay long enough to win over the holding company? She had come to do a job, and she didn’t know how she would insinuate herself into the day-to-day life of the business well enough to keep them from sending her back.

When the occasion came, it hadn’t been a problem at all. She was a figurehead in Porte Oliva, a curiosity in Carse, and Komme Medean was more than happy to have her where she wasn’t even a social presence in the company. Oddly, she didn’t resent it. She had the feeling—true or not—that Komme Medean was willing to play this game with her. Willing to see if she could charm and impress him. And that along the way, he would throw obstacles in her path.

His son, for example.

As they walked past the great jade statue, the Grave of Dragons opened out before them. Cut down into the living earth, the tiers of the grave were wider than streets, curving and turning like the drawing of a riverbed, but too perfect to have been cut by any real water. The stone flowed out for over a mile, ten tiers deep, and at each level, the tombs.

The bodies, if they had ever really been there, were gone centuries ago. But the dragon’s jade altars still showed the clawmarks of the dead. Most had three great toes at the front and one in the rear, but some had only two in the front. Some two in front, and two in back. In the deepest tomb, a single massive dragon’s footprint sank into the ground almost as deep as Cithrin’s waist. Mineralized lines on the sides showed where rain had collected in it as if in a pond, and dried away. It was clean and empty now.

“Go ahead if you want,” Lauro Medean said. “It’s all right. Everyone does.”

Cithrin smiled, looked around, and then lowered herself into the footprint and lay down, stretching her arms above her. Her feet and fingertips couldn’t quite touch the edges at the same time. She imagined the dragon floating through the sky above her, blotting out the sun. Once, it had. Once, they had flown in this air, above these cliffs. The thought took her breath away.

When she stood, she saw Lauro’s grin.

“Funny?” she asked, putting up her hand. He took it—he had a strong grip—and helped her back out. They began walking back.

“It’s just I’ve grown up here. I never get impressed because it’s always been here. I like seeing people see it for the first time. It means something to them that it never does to me.”