The King's Blood(53)

Cithrin pressed a fingertip against the northern coast, tracing it from Northcoast to Asterilhold to Antea. She had fled Antean swords before now. The Imperial Army had taken Vanai, and some Antean governor had burned it. They would remember that. The border between the combatants was a river flowing up from the marshes in the south and spilling into the northern sea. Only a single dragon’s road crossed the water like a gate in a wall. The sea would be, if anything, the wider battleground. When the nobles and merchants of Asterilhold fled west, away from the enemy, Northcoast would be the only place to escape to.

“Yes, they are. Salvage rights are rights,” Marcus was saying. Cithrin realized she’d missed part of the conversation.

“When it’s your name taking the risk, you can keep anything stolen from anyone and you go to the carcer for it. I’m—”

“I’d like to speak with the captain alone now, please,” Cithrin said. Three sets of eyes turned to look at her. Pyk and Marcus both smoldered with anger. Yardem was unreadable as always. “Just Marcus. Just for a moment.”

Pyk made a spitting sound, but didn’t spit. Her rolling gait made her seem like a ship caught on high seas as she strode out. Yardem nodded, flicked one ear, and retreated, pulling the door to behind him.

“That woman is a disaster,” Marcus said, pointing two fingers at the door. “I think they sent her just to punish us.”

“They probably did,” Cithrin said. “That’s part of why she’s right.”

“She’s not, though. As soon as Rinál took those crates, he—”

“Not about that. About Carse. I can’t take you.”

Marcus crossed his arms and leaned against the high table that was the last remnant of the old gambler’s desk. His expression was empty.

“I see,” he said.

“I’m going to Carse to win over Komme Medean,” she said. “If I’m bringing a scandal along with me, it doesn’t help. And you’re Marcus Wester. You’re the man who killed the Mayfly King. I forget that because I know you. And you don’t make that who you are. But for the rest of the world, and especially the court in Northcoast, they won’t hear your name without thinking of armies and dead kings. I need Komme Medean to like me. Or respect me.”

His lips pressed white, sharp lines of anger drawing themselves down the sides of his mouth. For a long moment, Cithrin had the sick feeling that he was about to resign. Quit her and the bank and everything else. Then he looked at her and he softened.

“Well,” he said. A dog yelped and a man’s voice cursed not far away. Marcus scratched his cheek, the sound like sand falling against paper. “I suppose someone’s got to keep an eye on Pyk.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll still need guards. If it’s not me and Yardem, you’ll need four at least. We’re just that good.” Cithrin smiled and Marcus managed to smile back. “Just… just promise me you’ll be safe. I have a bad history of losing people in Northcoast.”

“I promise,” she said.


F

or all that Cithrin had remade herself as an upstanding and important citizen of Birancour, she had never been inland farther than the coastal mountains and foothills that separated it from the Free Cities, and then in the grip of winter. She had imagined it all to be like that—rolling hills and stones punctuated by forests and meadows. The land between the Free Cities had been like that where it hadn’t been mud and snow. It was only when she passed out from the last trailing houses and farms of Porte Oliva that she saw the wide, open sweep of the land and heard the voice of the grass singing for the first time in her life.

The interior of Birancour was flat, without so much as a hill to break the horizon, and the dragon’s jade road passed through it. Cithrin found herself imagining that the road was a living thing that folded in on itself behind them and rose up before, a companion sea serpent escorting her across the oceanic grass. If she’d been asked, she would have said that the sound of tall grass shifting in the breeze would be like a scratching, like rubbing handfuls of straw together. It was like walking under a waterfall. Even the lightest breath of wind roared, and after the third day, Cithrin began to hear things inside it—voices and music, flutes and drums and once a vast choir of voices lifted together in song.

Farmhouses and cultivated fields seemed to rise up and fall away like images from a dream. She almost expected the men and women they met on the road to be some new, unknown race, or to speak with the hush of the grasslands in their voices, but instead they were Firstblood and Cinnae, their faces leathery with the sun and palms yellow and callused. The people seemed so familiar and common and prosaic that Cithrin began to tell herself it was only the unfamiliarity and her own anxiety that made the place seem somehow less than real. When a massive creature easily half the size of her own horse but black and wet-looking with dagger teeth and an improbably ornate and flowerlike nose slid across the road before them, it took her guard’s yelp of alarm to convince her it was real.