The King's Blood(119)

“And if I told you I was looking for Jorey?”

She smiled. Clara had always had the talent for looking pleased without denying that she felt weary.

“I’d ask why you weren’t looking in his room or the barracks.”

“I was going to,” Dawson said. “But I got distracted.”

She put down her work and patted the mattress at her side. It was too soft, of course. Klin was a weak man at heart, and always had been.

“Tell me again,” Dawson said, “what happened when Phelia Maas died.”

“Well, you recall we were in the drawing room, you and Jorey and Geder and that very large religious friend of Geder’s. And poor Phelia was in a state of nerves. When Palliako began unveiling everything that had been going on with Feldin, the poor thing fell apart…”

She told it all again, as she had before. The pretended errand to Maas’s mansion, the priest’s insistence when challenged that they were there at the baron’s request. Then the letters that proved his conspiracy, and the discovery. Phelia’s death.

And after, when Vincen Coe had stood against the baron and his men in the corridor while Basrahip the goatherd priest hectored Maas into walking away. Dawson tried to picture it, and failed. He had fought Feldin Maas many times, and more than one of those had been with a blade. To go meekly. To drop his sword and turn away.

“They have some evil magic,” he said. “It breaks men. It broke Maas and the men in the keep at the Seref. And it’s breaking Klin. I can see it in him. He spoke to them, and it’s drowned the fire in him just the way it did for the others.”

“Are you sure it isn’t the fever and fighting that’s doing it?” Clara asked. “It doesn’t take magic to break someone’s spirit. The world can be enough.”

There was a truth in her words he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was there, patient and implacable. The exhaustion pressing down on his shoulders drew from more than the battle dragging on. More than his frustration and fear. It was also grief. He had done his best for his kingdom. He had done his duty as he saw it, standing bulwark against the small, shortsighted men who would change it. If Simeon had lived only a few more years, enough to give Aster the throne without a regency…

Clara took his hand, and he tried to muster some hope.

“Skestinin’s got to be getting close by now,” he said. “Once he brings his men south, he’ll get the gates opened. We’re too evenly matched now, and he can tip the balance.”

“Will that be a good thing?”

“If it was only Barriath being under his command, no,” Dawson said. “But there’s Sabiha. Skestinin’s family now. With his reinforcements, we can turn this. We’ll get you and the girl out. Jorey, if he’ll go.”

“And you?”

The drums sounded, deep and dry. He saw Clara shudder. The defense again. Another wave of attackers come to erode their strength. They were coming more often now. They weren’t coming to win, but to keep Dawson’s men from resting. A siege within a siege.

“I have to be there,” he said. “I am sorry the world came to this, love. It ought to have been on better behavior with you in it.”

“How eloquent,” she said, only half mocking. “You’re a flatterer, you know.”

“You’re worth flattering,” he said, rising from the bed.

By the time he reached the street, the men had already pushed back the latest assault. The sun had turned the cobbled streets hot. Even after sunset came, the heat would be rising up out of the land for hours. In better years, he would have been setting out for the Great Bear now, preparing himself for an evening of cooled wine and debates, contests of poetry and rhetoric. In better years, the summer would not have been so hot.

In the yards, men had built tents and defenses like an army on campaign. Klin’s gardens were pounded into dust by boots. The roses had been cut down to make room, and a wide arbor where grapevines had hung down, dripping with wide green leaves was a pair of broken stumps, the body of the thing part of a street barricade. The men themselves slept on cots, torpid in the heat, or paced to and from the water trough. Their faces were dirty and closed, their move-ments defensive. Even in the way they drank a tin of water and nodded to each other, they were the image of a beaten army.

It wasn’t true, of course. In the other mansions and squares, there would be other men who’d taken the other opinion who were just as hot and just as tired, who saw the damage being done to the city and felt its loss as deeply. There was no reason that Dawson’s men should be hanging their heads. The battle wasn’t lost as long as they stood.