The King's Blood (50 page)

“He will,” Kit said. “I wouldn’t have given him the money otherwise.”

“Right, you can tell,” Marcus said. “I keep forgetting about that.”

One of the curiosities of Suddapal was the utter lack of inns and wayhouses. There were travelers, but negotiating shelter was a matter of knocking on doors until someone with a spare room or space in a shed was willing to reach agreement. In good weather, they went to a great common green in the middle of the city and set up camp there just as they would have on the road. Timzinae boys walked the green from dusk until late into the night selling baked fish and goat in bowls made from turtle shells. The horizon was clear and the smell of the sea air so clean and unthreatening that they put their bedrolls out without the bother of the little lean-to tent. The horses, they stabled, though other people had let theirs wander the green, cropping the grass and sleeping in a great and temporary herd.

Marcus traced the constellations, his fingers laced behind his head. It had been a long time since he’d just looked up at the stars. Beside him, Master Kit sighed.

“Maybe we should have started by sea,” he said. “We could have gotten a boat in Maccia. Or gone west to Cabral and made up the time by sailing.”

“I thought the currents wouldn’t have done the right thing.”

“But if we’re going to end up hiring on help anyway,” Kit said.

“We couldn’t have known. It was the best guess we had. Not like there’s much else we could go on.”

“No,” Kit said. “I suppose there’s not.”

Across the green, someone struck up a tune on a small harp.

“Are you still worried about her?” Master Kit asked.

“Cithrin, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Marcus said. “But I think you were right. She wouldn’t have been counting on me to come save her. So at least I won’t have disappointed.”

“You sound bitter.”

“That’s because I’m a mean bitter old man. Do you see those four stars in a row? The ones right there near the horizon?”

“I do.”

“You can’t see them where I was born. Too far north. There are a lot of stars you can’t see from there.”

Kit made a small grunting sound by way of comment.

“You’ve traveled the world,” Marcus said. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Hmm. Let me see. There’s a lake in Herez. Lake Esasmadde. It’s huge. And in the center of it, there’s a whirlpool like when the last of the water is leaving a drain, but the lake never empties. And in the center of the whirlpool there’s a tower. Five stories tall, and utterly unreachable. As far as I can tell, it’s been that way since the dragons.”

“What do you think it is?”

“It could be a prison. Someplace that the dragons dropped their bad slaves. Or the last retreat of Drakkis Stormcrow. I really couldn’t say for certain. What about you? What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen in your travels?”

“Probably you.”

“Well. Fair enough.”

The harp tune changed, shifting to a soft melody that the night seemed to carry on its own.

“I think the third string’s out of tune,” Kit said.

“Only a bit,” Marcus said. “And you aren’t paying for it.”

Sleep hovered at the edge of Marcus’s mind, but never quite descended. Kit shifted in his bedroll, and a falling star flashed overhead, there and gone before Marcus could say anything.

“You know,” Kit said, very softly. “I think I could make the nightmares go away. If you wanted me, I could try.”

“And how would you do that?”

“I would tell you that it wasn’t your fault, what happened to them. I could tell you that they forgave you. Given time, you would believe me. It might afford you more peace. Some sleep.”

“If you tried, I’d have to kill you.”

“That bad?”

“That bad,” he said.

“It wouldn’t take your memory of them.”

“It would take what the memories meant,” Marcus said. “That’s worse. Besides, they’re not bothering me right now.”

“I’d noticed that,” Kit said. “I thought it was a bit odd. You’ve seemed almost content. It’s unnerving.”

“I had everything in Porte Oliva,” Marcus said. “Steady work. A company that respected and followed me. I didn’t work for a king. I had Cithrin and I had Yardem. I am, by the way, going to kill him when we’re done with this. He betrayed me, and he’ll answer for it. You can try your little magic on that if you want.”

“I believe you,” Kit said. “But you’ve lost all of that now, haven’t you?”

“I have,” Marcus said. “I’m finishing up my fourth decade in the world sleeping on dirt and grass beside a man with spiders crawling though his veins. I have to get across the Inner Sea, and I don’t know how I’m going to manage it. If I do get there, I’m not certain yet how I’ll get back. And when I do, I’ll most likely be killed trying to slaughter a goddess. And I feel better than I have since Cithrin beat her audit. When I have something, I worry about all the things I’d have to do to keep it. Out here, I’ve got nothing. Or at least nothing good. And so I’m free.”

“That sounds like a complex way of saying that your soul is in the shape of a circle, turned on its edge,” Kit said.

Marcus nodded.

“You know I respect your wisdom and enjoy your company, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody likes you when you’re being clever.”

Marcus drifted to sleep even before the harpist quit for the night. He woke in the morning with dew in his hair and the blue-yellow light of dawn reaching across a perfect blue sky.

T

wo days later, they were walking past a small streetside café when Master Kit suddenly paused, his eyes narrowing at the worked iron sign of a dolphin above the door.

“Something?” Marcus said.

“Perhaps,” Kit said. “It’s been … Just a moment, would you?”

Inside, the café was dirty and close, the walls stained by years of smoke that came even now from the kitchen, leaving the place in a haze of charcoal smoke, seared fat, and spices that made Marcus’s mouth water just smelling them.

A young and angry-looking Timzinae man barreled out toward them, waving black hands.

“Not open yet,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” “Forgive me,” Master Kit said. “Your name wouldn’t be Epetchi, would it?”

The Timzinae’s eyes went wide, and then disconcertingly did it again as his nictitating membrane slid open with an audible click.

“Kitap!” he shouted, leaping to put his arms around Master Kit. “Kitap, you old bastard! We all thought you were dead by now. You and your friend come back to the kitchen. Ela! Kitap’s here, and you won’t believe it. He’s old and fat.”

Marcus found himself carried along on a wave of other people’s enthusiasm, seated at a cutting table, and eating from a bowl of something that looked like the waste scraped off a cooking grill and tasted better than anything he’d had in years.

All around him, Timzinae men and women were smiling, and little boys and girls so young that their scales were still light brown were trotted out bored but patient to Master Kit, who delighted over each one. When he introduced Marcus by his full name, he could tell that the first man—Epetchi, his name was—was skeptical. But if old Kitap wanted to travel with a man who pretended to be the murderer of kings from Northcoast, it was apparently fine by him.

They weren’t permitted to sleep under the stars anymore. Instead, they had a room in the back of the café and bedded down on a thin cotton mattress that had seen cleaner days.

“Friends, I take it?”

“When I first came into the world, I spent the better part of a year in Suddapal,” Master Kit said, laying his bedroll out over the mattress. Probably wise. At least all the insects living in their bedrolls were familiar. “I stayed here. Epetchi was just a boy then. Thin as a stick and couldn’t think about anything but girls.”

“Do you think they can help us, then?”

“I think that if they can, they will. That may not be quite the same thing. But I have more faith in goodwill built with meals and shared stories than goodwill bought from strangers with coin.”

“You know,” Marcus said, “I didn’t force you to pay the finder’s fee.”

“The world’s an odd place,” Kit said, and sat down with a grunt. “The last time I was here, everything was different. I was different, they were. Even the building’s changed. There wasn’t a wall there, at least not that I recall. And yet it was all related. It’s as if the world was a stone, hard and unchanging as we lay paint over it, one layer and then another and then another. We change it by the weight of the stories we bring to it, but we only change what’s there. Not the stone nature of the world.”

“That sounds very deep,” Marcus said. “Don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, though. Do you think they know someone with a good boat?”

T

he captain of the little sailing boat was a Timzinae woman with a broad face and a wicked smile. At Epetchi’s instructions, they met her near the end of one of the long piers. So far from the shore, Marcus felt he’d already left the city. She sat in the back of her boat, wrapping long, braided ropes in patterns that Marcus, in another context, would have mistaken for art. Her name, they’d been told, was Adasa Orsun.

The boat itself was small enough for one person to manage, large enough to carry five if they didn’t need to lay in provisions for a long trek across open water. The deck was white as snow and its sails were square sheets of thick canvas dyed the blue of the sea. It bobbed with the waves, a little up, a little down. As close as it rode to the waterline, Marcus couldn’t imagine how it would keep from being swamped in a storm. But there were at least a dozen other boats similar to it tied to the pier, so there was something to the design or the handling that made it possible.

That or they just didn’t put out to sea if there was weather.

Master Kit made the introductions.

“We were led to understand you might be willing to take passengers south to Lyoneia,” he said.

“Might be,” the woman said. “For the right price. When are you wanting to leave?”

“Sooner would be better,” Master Kit said with a smile. “Can’t go for a month,” she said with a shrug. “Other work already agreed to.”

Marcus didn’t need little black things living in his veins to know it was a lie. The woman smiled up at them. The next move was theirs.

“I am a friend of Epetchi’s,” Master Kit said.

“And so I’m talking to you,” she answered. The rope flowed in loops over her arm and cascaded down.

“I can pay,” Kit said, tossing her a small leather purse. She didn’t open it, just tested the weight in the palm of her hand.

“This gold?”

“Silver. Some copper.”

“And a pretty stone I put in,” Marcus said. “If we can stop dancing, what’s it going to take to get this”—he pointed at the deck—“there?” He pointed at the sea stretching away to the south.

The woman looked at him, then turned back to Kit.

“Who’s he?”

“My name’s Marcus Wester.”

“Sure it is,” she said, not looking at him.

“His name is Marcus Wester,” Kit said. “And yes, he’s that Marcus Wester.”

“Is not.”

“Listen to me,” Kit said with a sigh. “Listen to my voice. This man is Marcus Wester. He is.”

“Have been since before people thought much of it,” Marcus said.

Adasa Orsun tucked the purse into her jacket.

“All right, then,” she said. “Bring your things. The tide’s in six hours, and we’ll be out on it.”

“Because everyone wants to travel with me?” Marcus said.

“Makes a good story,” she said, turning back to her ropes. “You best hurry. Get some good food while you’re at it. I’ve got enough to keep everyone alive, but I run a ship, not a kitchen.”

As they walked back down the long stretch of tar-soaked logs that made the pier, Marcus shook his head.

“I don’t like that,” he said. “She doesn’t know us. Not really. What if I was a terrible, violent, mean-spirited person? I mean, I’m mostly known for killing my employer. You wouldn’t think that would make traveling with me more attractive.”

“I think we are the stories people tell about us,” Kit said.

“No,” Marcus said. “We aren’t. We’re more than that. And our friend on the boat there is taking a stupid risk by going with us.”

“I suppose so,” Kit said. “But I’m still glad she is.”

Clara

C

lara could not tell whether the darkness had taken the city, the kingdom, the world as a whole, or only her. When she rose in the morning, the sky seemed dimmer than it had before. When she ate, the salt seemed both weaker and less palatable at the same time. She slept little, waking in the middle of the night and staring up at the ceiling that wasn’t hers. Sometimes she forgot why Dawson wasn’t beside her, and then recalled, and felt the despair roll over her afresh. As if it were all happening again.

But she didn’t allow herself to stop. If she stopped, she was certain she would never start again. It wasn’t even that she would die. She would simply be, still and grey and unmoving. A statue of herself in stone.

“Good morning, Mother,” Barriath said as he stepped into the little dining room. “There’s eggs ready.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said. “You rested well, I hope?”

“Well enough.”

In a better world, he would have been gone again by now. Back to the north and the ships. His place with the navy. Instead, he would spend the day brooding, going to tap-houses. And she would go instead along the streets and into the courtyards where she was barely welcome and see to it that her family survived this all as best they could. Or at least that part that hadn’t died.

The rain, when it came, hadn’t been a massive cloudburst, but a slow, low drizzle that made everything damp without cleaning anything. It did, however, bring the colors of everything out: the red stone arches of the Lias Gate looked like the coals from a fire that had almost burned out. The carving of the bear outside the Fraternity of the Great Bear looked less like a dust-colored dog on its back legs and more like a predator. Even Issandrian’s overly carved and decorated mansion was lent a kind of beauty by the rain. She would have to tell Dawson about that, only she wouldn’t.