The Dragon's Path

believe, brother,” Barriath said. “You won’t find someone against the farmers and supporting Asterilhold. If you want one, you take the other. No family will forbid mixing races and also trade with Borja. The king isn’t like a sculptor with a fresh stone, able to make whatever he sees fit. He’s like a man walking into a sculptor’s yard picking from what’s already there.”
    “And you think the prince is the only way he can show his favor?”
    “The only one that matters,” Barriath said. “If his majesty gave every favor and grant he has to Daskellin, and sent Aster to be the ward of Maas, he’d still be saying that in thelong term, the kingdom will be shaped by Maas’s vision. That’s why Issandrian—”
    “But if the king—”
    The two voices intertwined, neither boy listening to other, and the threads of their arguments tangled into a single ugly knot. Clara stepped out into the garden and put her hands on her hips in feigned accusation.
    “If this is how you greet your poor mother, I should have fostered you both with wolves,” she said.
    Her boys both grinned and came to embrace her. They were men now, strong-armed and smelling of musk and hair oil. It seemed like only the week before that she’d been able to take them in her arms. Then they started in again, talking over each other, only now the melee of words seemed to center on her and why she was there rather than the politics of the court. Clara beamed at them both and stepped down into the lush green and pale blooms of the summer garden. The fountain, at least, had been maintained, water splashing down the front of a contemplative if underdressed cast bronze Cinnae woman. Clara sat at the fountain’s lip and began pulling off her traveling jacket.
    “Your father, poor thing, is gnawing his foot off back at home, and as a favor to him and myself, I have come to keep up some semblance of normalcy. This idiotic bickering has cost me the better part of the season already, and I simply must see dear Phelia.”
    Jorey leaned against an ivied wall. Arms crossed and scowling, he looked like the image of his father. Barriath sat beside her and laughed.
    “I have missed you. No other woman would call the first armed conflict on the streets of Camnipol in five generations idiotic bickering,” he said.
    “I am just as sorry as anyone about what happened todear Lord Faskellin,” Clara said, sharply. “But I defy you to call it anything besides idiotic.”
    “Peace, Mother, peace,” Barriath said. “You’re quite right, of course. It’s only that no one else puts it that way.”
    “Well, I can’t think why they don’t,” Clara said.
    “Does Father know you’re going to call on Maas?” Jorey asked.
    “He does, and before you start, I am to be guarded the whole time, so please don’t bother with the monster stories of Lord Maas and all the terrible thing he’s like to do to me.”
    Her two boys looked at one another.
    “Mother,” Jorey began, and she cut him off with a wave of her hand. She turned pointedly to her eldest son.
    “I assume you’ve taken leave from the fleet, Barriath dear. How is poor Lord Skestinin and that painted shrew he had the poor judgment to marry?”
    T he streets of the city were full and busy. Carriage wheels clattered over the cobblestones. In the market, butchers sold meat and bakers, bread. Petty criminals scooped shit out of the alleys and off the pavement, guarded by swordsmen wearing the king’s colors if not precisely his livery. The cherry trees that lined the streets sported green fruit with real threats of red. Workmen hung out over the Division, repairing and maintaining the very bridges from which they were suspended. She had not thought it possible that a city could look as it had in better times, sound as it had, smell as it had, and still be bent double under the weight of fear. She had been wrong.
    It showed in small things. Merchants too quick to laugh, altercations over precedence and right of way, and the stony expression common to everyone in the city when theythought no one was watching. Even the horses smelled something, their huge, liquid eyes a fraction too wide and their gait just barely skittish.
    She’d chosen to take a sedan chair open on the sides with four bearers and Vincen Coe walking beside it. Something had happened to the poor man’s eye just before they’d left Osterling Fells, and the bruise had started to seep yellow and green down his cheek. He wore