The King's Blood

stop.”

“The dragons, I mean,” Geder said. “Here, look.”

Cithrin came and sat beside them as Geder drew out the problem fresh. Morade was a dot in the center, his clutchmates were set one on either side. And three stones were the places Drakkis Stormcrow might be hiding: Firehold, Matter, and Rivercave. The puzzle gave each of the dragons rules on how they could move and in which order, and the puzzle was to find how Morade could check all three hiding places while blocking his clutch- mates.

“What if Stormcrow’s in the first one?” Cithrin asked.

“No, you don’t ever find him,” Geder said. “It’s only to look in all three places.”

“What if…” Aster reached for the little improvised board and tried a series of moves that didn’t work. Cithrin left them to it, opening the pack and putting everything out where she could locate it again by touch. The candle wasn’t going to last all the way to nightfall. Not that day or night meant much in the darkness.

They ate their dinner in darkness, and Aster crawled up through the dark tunnel to watch the sunset fade at the bottom of the ruined warehouse. Cithrin sat against a wall of stone and earth, her wineskin in her hand. Geder, invisible, was before her and to the right.

“Do you think they really all died?” she asked.

“Who? The dragons? Of course they did.”

“I went to the Grave of Dragons before I came out here. The man I was with was saying that Stormcrow would put pods of them to sleep, hide them away so that they would wake behind enemy lines and attack from the rear.”

“I’ve read about that,” Geder said. “They had ships too that would carry people into the sky. They had spines of steel and knife blades as long as a street. They’d fight dragons with them.”

“Did they ever win?”

“I don’t think so,” Geder said. “If they did, I never read about it.”

“When I was a girl, I dreamed about riding dragons. Having one as a friend who could carry me up and away from Vanai and everyone I knew. Everything. I had these elaborate stories about how it would obey me and let me do whatever I wanted. And then…” She laughed, shaking her head though no one could see it.

“What?” Geder asked.

“And then the dragon turned out to be money,” she said. “Coin and contract and lending at interest were what let me fly. Who would have thought that was what I meant by dreaming of dragons?”

“It makes sense,” Geder said. “I mean, it wasn’t really gold either. Dragons or coins or riding off with an army at your back and a crown on your head. It’s all the same. It’s power. You wanted power.”

Cithrin sat with the thought for a moment.

“Did you want power?” she asked.

“Yes,” Geder said. She heard him shifting his weight in the earth. “I wanted to see everyone who laughed at me suffer for it. I wanted every humiliation answered for.”

“And now that you have the power, you’re living in a ruin that stinks of cat piss and eating whatever an acting company can scrounge for you,” Cithrin said. “I’m not sure the plan is going well.”

“This isn’t a humiliation.”

“No?”

“No, you’re here. And anyway, it isn’t over. We won’t die here. The people who started this will answer for it.” He said it calmly and with confidence. He wasn’t bragging, just saying what he saw. “So. Who was this man you were with? When you saw the Grave?”

“Komme Medean’s son,” Cithrin said, and took another mouthful of wine. “It’s hard, I think, for Komme. He built the bank from a small concern that his grandfather had started, and he made it into this grand system that covers the world. A lot of it, anyway. And then he had a son who doesn’t understand anything.”

Geder’s laughter was warm and rich and oddly cruel, as if hearing her casually insulting Lauro pleased him.

“His daughter’s smart, though,” Cithrin said. “Paerin Clark’s wife. If Komme wants to see the bank last another generation, he’ll give it to her.”

A gentle scraping announced the return of the prince, and the scattering of stones fell to the ground.

“How was it out there?” Geder asked.

“There was light,” Aster said. “And I heard some men on the road. They sounded angry.”

“Did they see you?” Geder asked a moment before Cithrin could.

“Of course not,” Aster said, and she could hear the grin in his voice. “I’m the prince of ghosts. No one sees me.”

That night was cooler than usual, though she couldn’t tell any difference from the steady depth of Aster’s breath. The wine had blunted her anxiety, but she hadn’t drunk all she had to hand. One more skin lay on the ground just out of reach, and lying in the darkness beside Geder, she thought about reaching for it. But the fact that she wanted it was its own argument against.

The combination of enforced quiet and fear were, she knew, an invitation to overindulge. If she were honest with herself, she had probably already missed an opportunity somewhere in the dark nights with Geder and Aster simply by letting the wine blunt her. On the other hand, sleeplessness wasn’t a very good way to stay alert and focused either. Somewhere in the middle there had to be a balance, a way to calm her nerves without softening them. She didn’t want to grow old and find herself one of the wasted, bleary-eyed drunks living in the taprooms. The potential was in her, and so she lay in the darkness and didn’t reach for the wineskin.

Geder rolled against her, his arm falling across her belly, his face turned to the place between her shoulder and the floor. He was warm, at least, and her mouth didn’t smell better than his. The pattern of his breath told her that he was pretending to be asleep, and she let herself smile at that. It took him time to work up his courage, and she wasn’t at all surprised to feel his hand cupping her breast.

She closed her eyes, thinking through what she ought to do. No, more than that, what she wanted to do. Aster had already proved that he could sleep through hours of candle-light conversation, and even laughter. But what was the protocol about sex with a king? Or a Lord Regent, anyhow. She could refuse him, and her guess was that he would take the rejection gracefully and with apologies. Or at least that’s how she expected Geder to treat Cithrin. If he chose to react as Lord Regent Palliako, that was something else. It would be interesting to know which of his different roles he adopted, but the price of finding out might be unpleasant.

Almost as if at a distance, she noticed her own breath growing shallow, which she thought was odd. And, unfortunately, it removed the option of feigning sleep herself. Surely she couldn’t want him. Could she? She’d only had one lover before, and she remembered reacting this way to his touches, more or less. She shifted her mind, by conscious effort attending to her body. The weight and warmth she found was surprising. Geder’s hand had shifted, his fingers pressing tentatively against her belly, inching slowly down, and instead of awkwardness or discomfort, she mostly felt impatience that he was being so hesitant. Either he was doing this thing or he wasn’t; hovering awkwardly at the edge was undignified. What was he going to do? Pretend his hand had just landed by chance? Oops, how did that get there?

Her laugh was unintentional and deep in her throat. He went perfectly still, like one of the cats trying to sneak past in the dark, pausing in fear.

This was a bad idea. On every level, this was a terrible, awful, awkward, improbable impulse, and the right thing to do was turn to him and tell him so, and make whatever peace they could salvage from having come so very near to catastrophe together. She shifted, her betraying body moving to keep his hand against her. She opened her lips to speak, but somewhere along that path, she was distracted, because instead she kissed him.

Oh dear, she thought as his surprise faded and his mouth softened against hers. That didn’t go well at all.

His hands rose to her, and his breath was shuddering. He was trembling.

“I…” he whispered. “I haven’t…”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I have.”

Cithrin!”

The whisper was like paper tearing. She struggled up from a sleep so profound that she didn’t remember at