The King's Blood(7)

Cithrin rose from her table, pacing. Voices rose from below them, reminding her how thin the floor was and how sound could travel. There were always guards in the office, making sure that no one could reach the strongbox set in stone beneath the building. It held the hard reserves of the bank. But the real wealth was in the paper—loan agreements, partnerships, depositors’ contracts—that were no longer even in the office. They were a long block to the south in the rooms that Pyk had taken for herself, the secret base of the bank.

“She’s gutted me,” Cithrin said. “She’s taken it all.”

“That was the agreement,” Yardem pointed out.

“I don’t care what the agreement was,” Cithrin said, fighting to keep her voice—even the tone of it—from leaking to the ears of the guards below her. “It’s not just that she disagrees with me. Or that she condescends. She’s making bad choices, Yardem. She’s walking away with coins still on the table. And she’s doing it because she’s too proud to take direction from an underage half-Cinnae girl.”

Cithrin raised her palms, daring Yardem to disagree. He scratched his knee in a way that made her think it hadn’t actually itched.

“Well, I am done with this,” Cithrin said. “If she wants war, then she will by God get it.”





Dawson Kalliam, Baron of Osterling Fells



W

ars are easier to start than end, and where they take you is rarely where you intended to go,” the ambassador said. “It will be better for all of us to avoid it.”

Dawson turned back from the window. Sir Darin Ashford, Lord of Harrin and Ambassador of King Lechan to Antea, sat in the old library, his legs crossed at the ankle and a carefully charming smile on his lips. He had come to the Kalliams’ holding at Osterling Fells two days before, announced by a letter and bringing a small enough retinue that he posed no obvious threat. They had observed the forms of etiquette since his arrival. This was the first candid conversation they’d had.

The walls of granite and dragon’s jade gave the room a sense of terrible age and grandeur that Dawson liked. It lent the room and the holding the sense of permanence that they deserved. The sense of right things in their right order. It was a contrast to the subject of their talk.

“You might have thought of that before you plotted to kill Prince Aster,” Dawson said.

The ambassador sat forward, one finger held high. He wore the silver cuffs that Dawson’s wife Clara assured him were the fashion in Kaltfel that year and the decorative wrist chain that marked a married man in the courts of Asterilhold.

“Now that’s just the kind of rhetoric to be careful of, Baron Osterling.”

“As long as you’re lecturing me on how to speak, you may as well call me Dawson.”

Ashford either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it.

“All I mean is that Asterilhold didn’t have any ill wishes toward the prince or the Severed Throne.”

Dawson walked three steps and gestured to a pelt that hung on the wall. The years had greyed the deep golden fur, but the sheer size of the tanned skin was still impressive.

“Did you see this?” Dawson asked. “Mountain lion killed ten of my serfs. Ten of them. I left court a month after my first boy was born to hunt it. It took me three weeks to track it down, and four of my huntsmen fell before we brought it to ground. You would have been… five years old, then? Six?”

“Lord Kalliam, I respect that you are my elder, and I see that—”

“Don’t lie to me, boy. We both know there were knives meant for Aster’s throat.”

“There were,” Ashford said. “In both our courts. Asteril-hold’s not a single thing any more than Antea is. A few people corresponded with Lord Maas about his ambitions. To hold the whole court responsible for the secret actions of a few will drag both our kingdoms into chaos.”

Dawson stroked the dead cat’s fur as he weighed what to say next. The kingdoms of Asterilhold and Antea were like brothers. In centuries before, they had answered to the same High King. Several generations back, the noble houses had made a fashion of intermarrying in hopes that it would drive their nations toward peace. Instead it had confused the bloodlines and given dukes in Asterilhold a plausible claim to the Antean throne. If only you killed enough of the people in between.

It was the fate of all reforms that they turned against the reformers. History was rotten with men and women who had sought to remake the world in the image they had created of it. Inevitably, they failed. The world resisted change, and the nobleman’s role was to protect the right order of things. If only that order were always clear. He caressed the dead animal one last time and let his fingers fall from it.