The King's Blood

“My lady,” a man’s voice said, like warm flannel on a cold night. “No.”

She turned, surprised. Some part of her that still cared about such things reached to straighten her hair and tug her dress into its best drape. The rest of her, the vast majority, collapsed in a hilarity of relief and embarrassment and an amused kind of dread that was much more pleasant than the sincere one she’d been inhabiting.

“Coe,” she said, laughing and crying. “Oh, not this too.”

He put a hand on her shoulder. His expression was so sincere. So open and concerned and young.

“This isn’t the way, my lady. Come with me.”

“I wasn’t going to jump. I wasn’t. I mean not now, not with so much to do. There’s the boys, you see. And my daughter, my new one, you won’t have met her. She’s a dear child, but troubled. Troubled. And to go now, to leave now with everything in such a state.” She had trouble with the words because the sobbing was so hard now that there was very little room for them. “I couldn’t leave it all like this, so broken and so empty. Oh God. What have we done? How? How did I come to this?”

Somewhere in the middle of it all, he’d lifted her up, taken her in his arms like she was a child.

“You can’t do this,” she said. “I don’t love you. I don’t know you. I can’t ever be what you want me to be. I’m married. I mean…”

“You don’t have to speak, my lady.”

“I’m poisoned,” she said. “Everyone I know is tainted by me. My sons. Even my sons. They’ll look at you and they’ll see me. And if they see me, they’ll see him, and they’ll do to you what they did to him. I can’t stop it. I can’t even slow it down.”

“I’m no one, my lady. I have nothing to lose.”

“And I’m getting your shirt all wet. This isn’t wise. You should go. You should go.”

“I won’t,” he said.

She was silent for a long time. His arms weren’t even trembling. She felt he could carry her forever if he chose to. He smelled like dogs and trees and young man. She laid her head against his shoulder and heaved a sigh. When she spoke again, the hysteria was gone.

“I’m not some fucking little girl who needs rescuing,” she said.

“No, my lady,” he said, but she could hear the amusement in his voice. She sniffed. Her nose was running. The streets around them were close and dark. Three men couldn’t walk abreast through them. The poorest quarters of Camnipol closed around her like a blanket. Vincen Coe carried her through the shadows and the light.

“Shit,” she said, and clung to him.

The rooming house was terrible. It stank of old cabbage, and the walls were stained green and black in drips that had dried solid years before. There was a wardrobe with a missing door and nothing inside, and the dirty little window no wider than her hand let in only enough light to condemn the surroundings. The bed was small and stained, but it had a mattress. He put her down on it, and she curled up. It smelled rank, but it was soft and her body curled against it with the weight of exhaustion.

He brought her a wineskin filled with water and a wool blanket that smelled more of him than of the room.

“There’s no common room here,” he said. “But there’s a fire to sit near in the kitchen. The man across from you shouts sometimes, but he’s harmless. If you need me, I won’t be out of earshot.”

She nodded.

“My family doesn’t know where I am,” she said.

“Should we send word, my lady?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“As you see fit.”

He leaned close and kissed her once gently on the temple. He hesitated for a moment the way she would have if she’d been a man and she’d wanted to kiss a woman’s mouth. She shifted her eyes to his, and he stood.

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she said.

“My mother’s considerably older than you, my lady,” he said.

“Why are you doing all this?”

“Because you’ve let me,” he said. “Sleep now. We’ll talk later.”

The door closed behind him, and Clara lay in the dim and stinking gloom.

“Well,” she said to no one, and didn’t finish the thought.

Geder

Lord Palliako, the letter said, I am very sorry to have been called away on such short notice, but word has come from the holding company that requires my immediate presence. Thank you very much for the offer of your hospitality and your company during my time in Camnipol. It has been a singular experience, and one I will recall fondly. The challenges of governing a nation as great as your own must take precedence over matters like small personal correspondence, but I will be paying close attention to the news from Antea.

The chop was Cithrin bel Sarcour.

He’d read the words a thousand times already, and he expected he’d read them a thousand more. He could hear her voice as if the paper itself had soaked it in. The softness in her throat. The slight melancholy in her inflection of fondly. He had read love notes before, but usually in the form of poetry or song. To cast it as business correspondence was both odd and exactly what he would have expected of a banker.

He’d been worried after the execution of Dawson, that he’d offended her, either in the way the execution had taken place or from the way he’d reacted after. He’d often heard that killing a man was an upsetting thing, especially the first time, but he’d nearly been sick in front of the whole court. It hadn’t been in keeping with his dignity, but he’d do better next time. And anyway, she seemed to have forgiven him if there was anything to be forgiven.

As he reached the door, he tucked the letter in his pocket. The voices of men so rough and grating by comparison to the woman he’d conjured leaked through the door. Geder motioned to his personal guard that they should wait for him to precede them, then pushed his way through into the meeting room. Basrahip followed on his heels and before the guard. That wasn’t a matter of etiquette so much as the habit that they had all formed.

Maps littered the table, four and five layers thick in places. Canl Daskellin and Fallon Broot stood over the mess, scowling and angry-looking.

“Gentlemen,” Geder said. “I take it we’ve made no particular headway.”

“Asterilhold, in practice,” Daskellin said, “is posing several problems we hadn’t anticipated.”

“You’re damn near out of noble families,” Broot said. “There were only about forty to start, and that’s counting the eastern Bannien group as their own that just happen to have the same name. The ones we lost in Kalliam’s rebellion, that’s down to thirty-four, thirty-five.”

“Broot wants to redraw the map of Antea while we’re about it.”

“Doesn’t make sense for a man to have two holdings on different sides of the river. How are you to oversee them both? Spend half the winter one place? Only see a holding every second year? It’s just sense to expand the existing baronies.”

“These aren’t just dots on a map, Broot. These are places. My family has lived on its holding for ten generations. My grandfathers are all buried there. It’s not as if we can switch that to some field in the middle of Asterilhold and call it the same.”

Geder raised his eyebrows. This wasn’t the part of being regent he was best at, but they were right. It would need to be addressed.

“And there’s the problem of the cities,” Broot said, pointing an accusing finger toward the blotches of Kaltfel and Asinport. “We can’t make them part of a barony and check in on them once a year. We could try it, but they’ll