The King's Blood(22)

And there would be nothing.

“My lady,” he said, the words crisp as a bark.

“Coe,” she said.

There was no call to continue. It was her place to command and his to follow. She didn’t need to explain herself to him, except that she did need to.

“Is there a problem, my lady?”

“I love my family dearly,” she said. “And I will protect them from whatever dangers I can. And at whatever price is asked.”

“Of course,” he said. He didn’t understand what she was saying any better than Sabiha Skestinin had.

You’re a child, she wanted to say. Go find a girl your own age and make handsome, charming babies with her. You have no business with me.

“I need you to return to Osterling Fells,” she said. “I want you to oversee the construction of my husband’s new kennels.”

The shock on his face was like a blow. His face paled.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Have I given offense? What did I… ?”

Clara clasped her hands behind her. The air in the servants’ quarters was somehow thinner than in the main house. Harder to breathe.

“We both know what this is,” she said. “Are you truly going to make me explain it?”

“I…”

The huntsman bowed his head, and when he lifted it again, his expression wasn’t of a servant speaking to his master, and the depth of his voice gave his words an extra meaning that mere grammar didn’t carry.

“I will serve my lady as she sees fit,” he said. “I have no other task.”

“And if she sees fit to send you to the holding to look after the kennels?”

“If she sees fit to send me to hell, my lady.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” she whispered.

For a moment, time stopped between them. A single moment with the duration of a season, because it was the last. Clara turned and walked slowly back to the main house. Her breath was returning to her slowly. She squared her shoulders. She wanted to go to her rooms, to sit with her embroidery and her pipe and recapture, if she could, a few moments of the quiet of winter. She wanted to be calm again. She wanted to be still.

But Dawson’s voice carried through the front hall as she entered it. She knew from the tone of it that he was annoyed, but not truly angry. His moods and temper were as familiar to her as her own clothes, and as comforting. Two of his hunting dogs paced nervously in the corridor outside his study, whining under their breath and looking from Clara to the closed door and back again. She paused to scratch them gently behind the ears.

Dawson sat at his desk. A letter spilled out over it. She didn’t need to see the royal seal. The quality of the paper and the precision of the handwriting was enough to know it came from King Simeon. She felt a moment’s relief. It wasn’t likely to be anything to do with Jorey.

“A problem?” she asked.

“Simeon’s moved back the audience with that half-wit bastard from Asterilhold,” Dawson said.

“The ambassador, you mean?”

“Yes, that,” Dawson said. “And the new date’s the same as Lord Bannien’s feast. And if that’s not enough, he’s asked for a private audience next week the same time I had a table of cards at the Great Bear with Daskellin and his fat cousin who doesn’t know how to play.”

“Ah,” Clara said. She stepped toward him, her hand on his shoulder. He took her fingers in his, kissing her gently without even being aware that he was doing so. Affection was a habit between them, more genuine for being unconsidered. She felt the rise and fall of his body more than heard his sigh.

“That man,” he said, “has no idea the things I sacrifice for him.”

“He never will,” Clara said.





Dawson



T

he Kingspire was not the original building that took the name. For as long as there had been a Camnipol, there had been a Kingspire, and so with every remaking of the city, every layer of history and ruin, some new castle had been built. Somewhere deep down, pressed into stone and forgotten, was the first Kingspire and the bones of the first kings.

The building Dawson had known as a boy, the one he walked through now, rose high at the northern end of the city, looking out over the Division. In the lower buildings, King Simeon kept his mansions as his father had before him, and his father before that, back four generations to the Black Waters War. Paths of white gravel wound through gardens kept with a precision that approached mathematics. No leaf seemed out of place, no stone off its center. Only the air was wild here, blowing off the southern plains, up through the city, and making its way along the paths in sudden gusts. It plucked the blossoms from the trees, scattering petals like snow and swirling them high into the air to fall slowly back to earth.