The King's Blood (55 page)

“Mother,” Jorey said when she came into the garden. His embrace was brief but fierce. She kissed his cheek.

“Clara,” Sabiha said, coming to her. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Much like Clara’s own, she imagined.

Clara made a point to kiss her as well. There was so little she could do for the two of them and so much they needed.

“I’ve come for my allowance,” Clara said with a smile she only half felt. “I hope the timing isn’t bad.”

“You’re always welcome, Mother,” Jorey said, biting at the words. It was eating him. She saw that.

“You’re kind,” she said. “It’s your weakness. It’s mine too. Sabiha dear, I was wondering if, now that I’m disgraced, I couldn’t spend time with my grandson.”

“Your …” Sabiha said, then flushed.

“I told you to forget him once,” Clara said. “I was wrong to do that. We are not the family we had hoped to be, but we are the family we are. You are important to me, and so he should be as well. If I have your permission.”

“My permission?” Sabiha said.

“Of course, dear,” Clara said. “You’re his mother.”

“You have my permission,” Sabiha said.

“No tears. None of that,” Clara said.

They visited for slightly longer than usual, and Clara would have stayed longer if it weren’t such a long walk home. She left when there would be enough light to make it the whole way. She didn’t like the streets around her boarding house, but she liked them even less at night.

She was almost to the Prisoner’s Span when five men with drawn knives stepped in front of her.

W

hen they lifted the cowl from her head, she was in a wide, dark room. The light came from an iron chandelier overhead, but she wouldn’t have been surprised by torches. Soldiers with bows at the ready were on either side, rising up impossibly high, a wall of men. And before her, a huge black bench topped by Lord Regent Geder Palliako. Clara felt the fear starting to shake her. Her ghost-self wailed and turned away in fear, and she went part way with it. The high priest stood behind her where she could not see him, though Geder could.

“Clara Kalliam,” Geder said. “Forgive the intrusion, but I had some questions I felt I had to put to you. If you lie to me, I will know and you will suffer. Badly. Do you understand?”

Her mouth was dry. How had she come here? What had she done? It was like she’d fallen asleep and come to a nightmare she couldn’t wake from. She felt caught at something, but she didn’t know what.

“I understand you are no longer living at your son’s house,” Geder said. “Is that true?”

Her breath was so ragged, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to speak. Wouldn’t silence count as a lie? She didn’t want to think what he could do to her. What he would do.

“It is,” she managed.

“Why is that?”

“My presence makes it difficult for Jorey and Sabiha to dissociate from the court’s memories of Dawson.”

“Have you been meeting with Ogene Faskellan?”

“Yes. We have had several visits.”

“Have you been meeting with Ana Mecilli?”

“Yes. Twice, I think.”

To her right, one of the soldiers shifted slightly, the sound sharp and dry. Her heart raced.

“Are you loyal to me?” Geder asked.

Clara shook her head, not
no
, but
I can’t answer that
.

“Are you loyal to me?” he asked again, his voice growing harsher.

“I don’t think about you one way or the other, my lord,” she said.

The sound of cloth shifting came from behind her.

“Really?” Geder asked. He sounded genuinely confused.

“You are Lord Regent, and the man who killed my husband, and Jorey’s friend from campaign. You’re the man who helped me to expose Feldin Maas. But none of that particularly affects what I have to do in my day. I suppose it should on some level, but I certainly don’t spend my time considering the question.”

“You’re meeting with all of these people. Are you organizing them against me?”

She laughed. She didn’t mean to. If she’d thought about it, she wouldn’t have, but there it was and the archer didn’t kill her for it.

“No. God, no. The thought never occurred to me. I’ve been trying to hold my family together.”

“Your family?”

“Yes. Barriath’s gone with hardly a word to anyone. Jorey and Sabiha are having a terrible time of it, and not even married a full season yet. Vicarian is the only one who hasn’t been seared by the whole terrible business. Well, and there’s Elisia. She appears to be doing well, but I can’t think she’s happy. Not really.”

“Oh,” Geder said.

“And of course with Dawson gone, there’s no one to hold it all together. There’s not even the house, which when you think about it is a fairly weak way to hold a family together, but we had it once, and now we don’t. And so there’s all this walking.”

Shut up, shut up,
shut up
, she thought, but her mouth kept tripping on ahead without her.

“And then there’s the question of mourning. How long does one wait, because on the one hand there’s a right and a wrong in court, but I’m not in court any longer, and so I don’t know what rules apply. I have to go about making them up. It’s terrible. It really is.”

“But you haven’t been conspiring against me or the throne?”

“No,” she said.

There was a pause.

“All right, then. Thank you for your time. You can go.”

Clara walked out into the open air. She was in the Kingspire. Her head was spinning a bit, and she stopped at the street gate to catch her breath. She felt absurdly relieved. As if she’d been attacked and escaped only through luck. Perhaps that was true. She understood the pinched faces now. The feeling of fear and oppression that hung over everything like black crepe. She wondered how many people had been taken away without warning and made to play Geder’s game of magistrate. More than only her, she was certain.

When she felt steady again, she made her way to the street. The Division was before her, and the Prisoner’s Span looked terribly far away. The sun was low and red and swollen in the sky, turning all the buildings west of her to silhouettes like a painting for a burning city. And what was worse, somewhere in the confusion, she’d lost her apples and cheese.

The sun had set long before she got back to her boarding house. Her feet were shouting with each step. Her spine felt like a column of fire. The smell of Abatha’s stew was actually attractive, which only gave an idea of how hungry she’d become. She made her way to the kitchen with the sole intention of paying her rent and buying a bowl of greasy stew, but Vincen was there, sitting by the oven. When he saw her, he leaped up, crossing the room in a stride, and lifted her in his arms.

“They told me you were gone,” he said. “They said the Lord Regent’s men took you.”

“They did,” Clara said and let herself fall into the embrace. Just a little. “You can put me down now if you like.”

“Never, my lady.”

“Very romantic,” she said. “Put me down.”

She sat by the oven, and Abatha gave her a bowl for free, so she bought a pipeful of tobacco instead. She told about her meetings with Ogene and Jorey and Sabiha, and then coming home only to be stopped by Geder’s men and carried away with a cowl over her face. She finished the last of her stew as she got to the strange dark room with the soldiers and Geder Palliako towering before her, demanding that she answer questions. She felt herself growing calmer with the retelling, as if she were seeing for the first time what had happened. The distance was reassuring.

She lit her pipe from the stove. Abatha’s stew might be salty and bland, but she did manage to find genuinely decent tobacco. Clara sat at the stove, puffing thoughtfully for a long moment before she realized Vincen and Abatha were waiting for her to go on.

“And then they let me go,” she said, rather gamely.

“But what did they ask?” Abatha said. Her face looked really animated for the first time since Clara had met her.

“Oh, that. They asked if I’d been conspiring against Geder Palliako and the crown.”

“What did you say?”

“That the thought hadn’t occurred to me,” she said.

“And?” Vincen said.

Clara raised an eyebrow.

“And now it has.”

Entr’acte

Master Kit

S

uddupal was at first a community of cities, their buildings and structures tall and solid, and then it was a dark and monstrous hand reaching out toward them with piers for fingers, and then it was gone, and they were alone on the wide sea. Adasa Orsun could sail the little ship by herself, moving from one line to another, lifting up the sails and shifting the angle of the rudder until everything was exactly as she wished it to be. Every now and then, she would tell Marcus to help her with some task where three hands were better than two. She never asked Kit, and honestly Kit didn’t mind.

It had been a very long time since he’d set out in a small craft over large water. He had almost forgotten the way the horizon-wide water and the open arch of sky conspired with the smallness of the boat and left him feeling overwhelmed and constrained at the same time. So much space all around him in all directions, and yet two paces this way, three in another, and a belowdecks so cramped that he couldn’t stand upright.

His life had become that as well. After his flight from the temple and the goddess and the only life he’d known, the world had unfolded before him, every new discovery egging him on to the one after. He’d learned that many of the things he’d been taught in the temple were true: the dragons were gone from the world and their slave races had made it their own, people of all races deceived each other almost constantly, wherever there were people gathered together in large groups there would be violence and death and theft. But he’d also found just as many that were wrong: that truth guaranteed justice, that the thirteen races were doomed to hate each other, that people like Adasa Orsun—Timzinae—were a separate and lesser kind of humanity. Finding his way through the mixture of myths and lies had become not only a life’s work but a joyful one.

He’d traveled widely and with men and women whose company he enjoyed. He’d listened to practical philosophers about the nature of the world. He had taken lovers and lost them. And in that wide, open sea of options and choice, his way had come down to this tiny boat on its way to a series of events both difficult and inevitable. In the face of the ocean, the tiny boat. In the face of freedom, only this: to save the world he’d discovered and come to love, or else die in the attempt.

It sounded heroic and romantic. The truth was sometimes something less.

“I ate a cockroach once,” Marcus Wester said. He was sprawled on the deck, shirtless, an arm flung across his eyes.

“You didn’t,” Kit said.

“I ate a mouse once.”

“You didn’t.”

There was a pause, and the world was only the soft wind and the lapping waves against the side of the boat.

“I ate a worm once.”

“Why did you do that?” Kit asked.

Marcus grinned.

“Lost a bet,” he said.

Adasa Orsun rose up from belowdecks, stretched her arms over her head, and yawned a wide, deep yawn.

“We’ve made good time,” she said, and she believed it. So probably they were.

“How can you tell?” Marcus asked. “It’s not like there’s a road you can follow or landmarks to see.”

“The water changes,” she said. “We’ll be to the islands in two, three more days. We have enough water and food until then.”

“We probably will,” Kit agreed.

“Was that in question?” Marcus asked. “I thought we’d intentionally packed enough to make it to the place we could get more. Did I misunderstand that?”

The Timzinae woman snorted derision.

“It’s the sea,” she said. “There’s always a question.”

W

hat about questions?” Marcus asked three days later as they walked down the stony streets of the island waystation. Ahead of them, Adasa Orsun was haggling with a Southling.

“What about them?”

“Can you have a false question?” Marcus said. “For instance, if I said something like,
Isn’t Sandr full of himself?
or
You can’t do that, can you?
They both mean something, but it’s not something that’s true, exactly, is it?”

“You’re forgetting. It isn’t truth. It’s
never
truth. It’s certainty. A question is uncertain by its nature.”

“But if I say,
I don’t know …
”

“You can be certain that you’re ignorant,” Kit said.

The Southling held up two fingers, the Timzinae three.

“What about,
I think her name is Adasa
.”

“You’re certain of that, yes.”

“I think her name is Mycah.”

“You aren’t certain of that. In fact, I suspect you’re certain that it isn’t. Though I wouldn’t know that based only on what you said.”

“That’s a strange line you walk,” Marcus said as they came to a rough corner. Nothing in the waystation was straight. The roads twisted and turned, following the shape of the rock. It gave the place an inhuman feel that Kit recognized and respected. It felt like the temple from which he’d fled.

“I think we all walk it all the time. I may be a bit more aware of it. I believe this is the place we needed. Only let me tell our captain where we’ve gone.”

He walked over to her. The spiders in his blood were excited, dancing and tugging at him. Being around so many people caught their attention after so long with only the same two. And there might only be five or six dozen people on the island, so small was it. To go from a long voyage into a real port was a deeply unpleasant experience. But that was a problem for another day.

“I can’t go lower than this and make enough to buy food,” the Southling man was lying.

Kit touched Adasa Orsun’s shoulder.

“Forgive me. I’m thinking of taking Marcus to the geographer’s shop over there. When you’re done here, will you look for us there?”

“I can,” she said.