The King's Blood(30)

“Can’t hurt,” Marcus said. “Meantime, though, let’s see if we can’t find your pirates.”





Geder



A

ster was smaller than Geder by half a head, and Geder wasn’t the tallest of men. The boy’s reach was less than Geder’s, and they were about equally strong. The advantage the prince had was this: he was fast.

The sword hissed through the air as Geder tried to get his own to block it. The blades chimed against each other, the shock of their meeting stinging Geder’s fingers. Aster spun, the blade pulled close to his body, and then reached out. Geder understood the attack too late. Aster’s stroke caught his shoulder, skidded off the dueling leathers, and ended on his ear. The pain was sharp and disorienting. Sword forgotten, he clapped his palm over his ear, staggered back, and fell on his ass. There was blood on his fingers. He heard Aster’s blade clatter to the ground and looked up. The prince’s eyes were round with alarm.

Geder laughed and held up his bloodied hand.

“Look!” he said. “It’s my first dueling scar. Thank God there’s not an edge on the blade, or you’d have had my earlobe off.”

“I’m sorry,” Aster said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“Oh, stop,” Geder said. “I know you didn’t. I’m fine.”

He rolled to his feet. The dueling grounds of his mansion were in the back gardens, away from the streets. Old ash trees lined the packed clay, their roots lifting and cracking the ancient stone wall. White roses were richly leaved, but not yet so much as budding. When they bloomed, the yard would be drowned in white petals. Geder got to his feet. His ear still stung, but not badly. Aster smiled uncertainly, and Geder grinned.

“You are a warrior and a man of infinite virtue, my prince,” Geder said, making a florid bow. “I yield to you on this field of honor.”

Aster laughed and made a formal bow.

“We should have someone put honey on that ear,” the prince said.

“Back to the house, then,” Geder said.

“I’ll race you.”

“What? You’d run against a poor wounded—” Geder began, and then broke off sprinting for the main house. Behind him, he heard Aster’s protesting yelp and then the pounding of his footsteps.

Geder’s boyhood had been, for the most part, in Rivenhalm. As the son of the viscount, he’d had the privileges of nobility, but very little to do with them. There had been servants and serfs enough, but the gap between the highest-born peasant and the heir to the holding was too great to bridge. His father had no love of court, and so Geder hadn’t had the chance to know other boys of his class. He read books from the library and built elaborate structures from twigs and string. In the winters, he walked along the frozen river dressed in black furs. In the springs, he carried books to his mother’s grave and sat beside her stone reading until the shadows of evening pulled through the valley.

He hadn’t thought of himself as lonesome. He had nothing to compare his life with, and so everything about it seemed perfectly normal. As it had always been. As it would always be.

When he’d come of age and entered the world of the court, it had been overwhelming, exciting, and humiliating. Everyone knew better than he did. He’d felt sometimes that there was a secret language everyone besides himself had been schooled in. Another man might say something that seemed perfectly innocuous to Geder—an observation on the length of a coat sleeve, a simple rhyme, a reference to the dragon’s roads that passed by Rivenhalm but never through it—and his friends would chuckle. Geder didn’t know what they were laughing at, and so he assumed they were mocking him. Before long they were, whether they’d begun that way or not. It was only after Vanai that he’d gained the respect of the court. And by respect, they meant fear. He liked being feared, because it meant no one laughed at him.

Aster, on the other hand, was a real friend. Yes, the prince was nearly a decade younger than Geder, and had been sur rounded all his life by friends and playmates. Yes, he knew the court better now than Geder ever would. But he was a boy, and Geder’s ward, and they were safe for each other. Geder could climb trees with him, practice dueling, race and laugh and swim at midnight in the fountains. With a man his own age, Geder would have been too wary of seeming foolish or having the desperation of his friendship mistaken for romantic love. With a woman, he probably wouldn’t have had the assurance to speak in sentences. But with the prince, Geder could play and laugh and joke and all anyone would see was a man being kind to a child.