The King's Blood (24 page)

He sat that night at a feast held by Sir Gospey Allintot. There had been a time not very long ago when Allintot had been if not his enemy then certainly not his friend. And now his full household was bent double for Geder’s honor.

Basrahip sat at his side as the hall filled with Allintot’s guests. Lady Oesteroth, wearing her husband’s dagger to show that he was in the field for the crown. Jorey Kalliam and his new bride. Sir Emund Serrinian, Earl of Whiteford. And coming in late and last to the high table, the Viscount of Rivenhalm, Lehrer Palliako. Geder’s father.

Geder went to him, tugging him toward the front. His father looked out over the crowd, squinting.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been at the high table,” his father said. “Traveling above my circles these days, m’boy. Above mine.”

“I think if your son’s regent, that makes you part of the high circles,” Geder said, laughing a little nervously.

His father clapped him on the shoulder and nodded, but didn’t say anything more. The meal was lavish—candied pork with onions, winter-bred pheasant basted with its own fat, lark’s tongue and blackberries—and all of it served on plates of silver and gold. A cunning man came out as entertainment, calling the names of angels and spirits until a ghostly light filled his eyes and his palms became bright as candles. Geder watched it all, his delight cooled by his father’s quiet eyes and unfinished food. When the cunning man’s show was finished, his used and prostrate form hauled off by servants amid laugh ter and delight, Geder leaned close to his father.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” Lehrer said. “No, my boy. Everything’s fine.”

He didn’t need Basrahip’s gift to know it wasn’t true.

“Come walk with me,” Geder said.

They were alone, except that of course they weren’t. The regent’s guards and body servants followed along at a distance as Geder and his father walked down the long, black-paved path to Allintot’s courtyard. The carriages and palanquins waited in the fading sunlight, ready to whisk away whatever noble blood wanted to go elsewhere. None of them would move so much as an inch while Geder remained at the feast. If he stayed until the dawn, each of them would too. The thought was strange and hilarious, and it made Geder want to try it, just to see the great men and ladies of the court trying to stay awake and pretending to enjoy themselves as the night grew longer beneath them.

His father found a bench and sat on it. Geder sat at his side.

“It’s quite a lot in not much time, isn’t it?” his father said. “My son, the Lord Regent. Who would have thought it, eh? It’s an honor. It’s… yes.”

“I wish Mother’d lived to see it.”

“Oh, oh yes. Yes, she’d have had something to say about it all, wouldn’t she? She was a firebrand, your mother. Hell of a woman.”

A cricket sang. The first one that Geder remembered hearing all season. A sudden powerful sadness rushed up in his chest, and with it a sense of grievance. He had done everything he could. He’d come as near to kingship as any man could who wasn’t chosen by blood. He’d saved Aster and protected Camnipol. He’d won, and still his father seemed distant. Disappointed.

“What’s the matter?” Geder said, more harshly than he’d meant to.

“Nothing. Nothing, it’s just the war. You know. All that fighting last year. All that unease. And now this, and… I don’t know. I was never meant for court life. All these people used to ignore me, and suddenly they pretend to care what I make of it all.”

Geder snorted.

“I recognize that,” he said.

“Do you ever wish it would all just go back to the way it had been? You back at Rivenhalm with me?”

Geder leaned forward, his hands knotted together.

“Sometimes, but it wouldn’t have happened that way, would it? If I hadn’t been in Vanai and then come back when I did, Maas and Issandrian’s showfighters would have taken the city. Aster would have died. We couldn’t be who we were anyway.” Geder shrugged. “The nature of history defies us.”

“I suppose that’s true. And still, I look at the future, and I dread it. Where does it all end, after all?”

“I don’t think the war will go on much longer,” Geder said. “And when it’s over, this mess will all be ended.”

Dawson

D

awson didn’t like it, but the war now was in the south. His men couldn’t cross the river, and barring a fresh rebellion in Anninfort, Asterilhold had nowhere to land on the eastern side. The blockade in the northern sea blocked trade and kept Antean ships from being harassed, but as long as the border with Northcoast remained open, food and supplies could pour into Asterilhold from the back.

The late spring was thick with mosquitoes, but cold. The high grasses rose to a walking man’s elbow, hiding bogs and cutting the horses’ flanks until they bled. The roads weren’t paved, only thin paths of stable land laced between creeks. The chill water had been fresh when it left the high glaciers topping the mountains to the south and was now undrinkable. Trees blocked their path where pools didn’t. The men’s clothes were starting to fall apart from mildew, and he had lost more soldiers to fever than to the enemy’s swords. His only comfort was that the forces of Asterilhold were suffering the same. There were no garrisons to take shelter in, no holdfasts. The nearest thing to real battle that anyone had seen was the poor idiot Alan Klin whom Geder Palliako had insisted be at the vanguard, and he’d only had a single real skirmish in a high meadow and been driven back from that.

And then the orders had come, written in Palliako’s own hand and under his seal. Withdraw his army to Seref Bridge to meet a group of priests who would somehow overcome the round keep and open the fast way to Kaltfel. Dawson had sent back for clarification. Not that he’d misunderstood, but if he accepted the order and drew his men to the north, it would only mean hauling them back down and beginning the whole painful campaign again when Palliako’s cultists failed. Clarification came, and Dawson had been left nothing except to obey.

Marching north on the cusp of summer, he had at least imagined that he would find a company of warrior priests, drunk on theology and righteousness and ready to throw themselves across the narrow bridge. Even that was a disappointment.

The three men wore robes the grey-brown of sparrows. Their wiry, coarse hair was pulled back from their faces, and they wore expressions of serene benignity that Dawson associated with men drunk past reason or else simple from birth. They stood at the end of the little parade ground outside the keep and bowed to Dawson as he passed.

Dawson leaned in toward Rabbr Bannien, eldest son of Lord Bannien of Estinford and now garrison commander, meeting the boy’s expression with something between despair and rage.

“Tell me this is a joke,” Dawson said.

“I thought the same when they arrived, Lord Marshal,” the young Bannien said. “But now I’ve been watching them for a time… I’m not sure anymore.”

Dawson turned back to consider the garrison force. He hadn’t left a full company at the bridge. There was no point, when a few dozen could defend the keep and a few hundred couldn’t win across to the other side. They looked sharp, smart, and well rested. Unlike his own men. An uneasy thought stirred in his mind.

“Are they cunning men?”

“I don’t think so, my lord. Not like any I’ve ever seen. They don’t… they don’t do anything exactly. It’s just… You’d have to see it, sir.”

“Right, then,” Dawson said. He strode to the tallest of the three priests, nodding at him rather than saluting. “Show me why I should trust my men to your plan.”

Half an hour later, the priest walked out onto the wide span of the bridge alone with only a caller’s horn. The span of the bridge and the rushing water below and the blood-and-stone of the round keep made the priest look like a painter’s image of faith: a sparrow overwhelmed but unbending. Dawson stood at the white keep’s open gate, watching with his arms crossed and tired to the bone from the march and the long, muddy slog of a war before that. Contempt swam at the back of his throat, tasting of bile.

The priest lifted the horn to his mouth and began to shout over the rush of the water below him.

“You have already lost! No force can stand against the army of Antea! You have no power here! You have already
lost
! Everything you fight for is gone already. Everything you hope for is lost. You cannot win.”

Dawson glanced over at the boy. Young Bannien looked out across the bridge, rapt. His eyes were on the priest, and the ghost of a smile played about the boy’s lips. Dawson felt laughter boiling up in his own throat; it felt like horror.

“This?” Dawson said. “This is how we take the far shore? We nag them out of it?”

“I know,” the garrison commander said. “I had the same reaction at first. But they do this every day and into the night. And the more they do this the more it seems like… it might be true.”

Dawson said something obscene.

“Get that idiot off the bridge before someone puts an arrow in him and bring him to me,” Dawson said. “We’re ending this before we waste any more time.”

“Yes, Lord Marshal,” the boy said, looking abashed. Dawson stalked off through the courtyard and up a flight of stone stairs. The commander’s private rooms were close, dark, and poorly lit. The choice was between light and air, but Dawson would by God see the face of the men he was speaking to. Meantime, he sat in the dim and he seethed.

Palliako’s cultists came together, all three. They bowed at the door and sat on the cushions at Dawson’s feet. They looked up at him with a profound calm, their dark eyes glittering in the candlelight. The garrison commander took his place behind Dawson, standing.

“Tell me the rest of the plan,” Dawson said. “Once you’ve finished your little theater piece, then what?”

The priests looked at one another. They seemed uncomfortable, so that at least was good. They had enough brains between them to notice when they were being dressed down. Dawson sat forward in the camp chair, wood and leather creaking under him.

“When they have understood, you will take what is yours from them,” the middle one said. He had a rounder face than the others, with thin nostrils and lips. He had an accent that reminded Dawson of reading ancient poems as a boy. The cadences of the words seemed like they’d been dug out of a ruin. Or a barrow. “There need be nothing more.”

Dawson ran the tip of his tongue across the inside of his teeth and nodded. It was a gesture he’d picked up as a boy by watching his father when the man was enraged to the edge of violence.

“The hell we will,” he said. “I don’t care if you talk until your tongues cramp. We don’t have the men or the position to take that bridge, and I won’t see a single Antean life lost by this folly.”

“The goddess is with you. You will not fail,” the round-faced priest said.

“Enough! Garrison commander Bannien, I will take full responsibility for ending this, and I will send my written judgment and corrected plans to Camnipol tonight. Please make a courier and horse ready as—”

“Listen to my voice,” the priest said. “You will not fail. We are servants of the truth and the goddess. What we tell you is true. Their men cannot stand against you. They will fail.”

Dawson leaned back. The heat of the room and the smoke of the candle were doing something unpleasant.

“How can you think that is possible?” he said. “Do they have fewer men than they did?”

“It does not matter how many they are.”

“Are they all sick? Is there plague?”

“It does not matter whether they are sick or well. You are the men of Antea, strong at heart and blessed of the goddess. They are weak, and their fear is justified.”

“Be that as it may,” Dawson said, “they are in a fortified position with our only line of attack clear, open, and insecure. All I need to do is look at a map and the numbers, and I can tell you as surely as I can tell you my own name that that keep can’t be taken any more than this one can.”

“Listen to my—”

“I don’t care to listen to your voice, boy,” Dawson said. “I don’t care how often you tell me that a pig is really a kitten. That doesn’t make it true.”

“Yes, my lord,” the middle priest said. “It
does
.”

Dawson couldn’t do anything but laugh. The candle flames danced and flickered.

“What is a word except what you mean by it, Lord?” the priest said. “This is a dog and that may be a dog, and yet they look nothing like each other. One is half the size of a horse, the other would fit in a woman’s lap. And yet we call them dogs.”

“You can breed them.”

“Timzinae and Haaverkin can’t breed. Which one is the human? A finch and a hawk are birds, can they share an egg? Words are empty until you fill them, and how you fill them shapes the world. Words are the armor and the swords of souls, and the soldiers on the other side of that bridge have no defense against them.”

“Nothing you just said,” Dawson said, stressing each word individually, “makes any damn sense. A war isn’t a word game.”

The priest lifted a finger. “When you became Lord Marshal, nothing about you changed. Your fingers were the same. Your nose. Your backbone. All of your body was as it had been, and yet you were transformed. The words were said, and by being said, they became true. A pig can be another kind of kitten if I say it and you understand its truth. If we say the Timzinae are not human, then they are not. We are the righteous servants of the goddess, and all the world is this way for us. Lies have no power over us, and the words we speak are true.”

“The words you speak won’t turn a blade,” Dawson said.

“Blades turn because hands turn. Hands turn because of hearts. Listen to my voice, Lord, and know what the men who have listened to us already know. What you want is already yours. The blades of Antea are of steel, and your enemies are grass before you.”

“Yes, well, you haven’t seen the grass I’ve just come from,” Dawson said, but his mind was already elsewhere.

The room was close and hot, and the air was thick. It felt like the war. Trapping, confining. They would be years in those marshes, fighting their way to the north mile by mile. Already they’d missed too much of the planting. Food would be scarce in the autumn, and next spring men would starve. And that was as it stood now. Today.