The Dragon's Path

of summer was gone. The seasons were changing again. Dawson turned away the footman’s assisting hand and climbed into his carriage.
    “My lord?” the driver asked.
    “The Great Bear,” Dawson said.
    The whip cracked, and the carriage lurched off, leaving the blocky towers and martial gates of the Kingspire behind. He let himself lean back into the seat, the jolts and knockssending jabs of pain up his spine. First the journey back from Osterling Fells and then the better half of the day waiting for his majesty to clear an audience for him had worn him down more than it once would have.
    When he’d been a young man, he’d ridden from Osterling Fells to Camnipol, stopping only to trade horses, arrived just before the queen’s ball, and spent the whole evening until the dawn dancing. Mostly with Clara. It seemed like a story he’d heard told of someone else, except that he could still see the dress she’d worn and smell the perfume at the nape of her neck. He turned the memory aside before his wife’s younger incarnation aroused him. He wanted to walk upright when he reached the club, and while he was old, he wasn’t dead.
    The Fraternity of the Great Bear rose up, its façade the black stone and gold leaf of the Undying City. Coaches and carriages were thick in the street, drivers pushing to position themselves where their particular masters would walk the fewest steps from carriage to door. The air stank of the fresh horse droppings being ground to paste under a hundred hooves. Dawson toyed with the idea of getting out here and walking in just to escape, but it was beneath his station, so he made do with abusing the driver for his slowness and incompetence. By the time the footmen of the club hurried out with a step for him, he almost felt better.
    Within, the club was a fabric woven from pipe smoke, heat, and music ignored in favor of conversation. Dawson gave his jacket to a servant girl who bowed and scurried away. When he entered the great hall, half a dozen men turned toward him, applauding his return with varying degrees of pleasure and sarcasm. Enemies and admirers. Dawson cut a bow that could be read as acknowledgment orinsult depending on who it was given to, scooped up a cut crystal glass of fortified wine, and stalked to the smaller halls on the left.
    A wide, round table sat in the center of one hall, a dozen men around it, many of them talking at once. In among the press of bodies and wit, Issandrian’s long hair and Sir Klin’s artless face. Issandrian caught sight of him and stood. He nodded to Dawson rather than bow. It might only have been a trick of the light, but the man seemed lessened. As if his exile had actually humbled him. The others at his table began to grow quiet, becoming aware that something was happening around them even if they were too dim to know what. Dawson drew his dagger in a duelist’s salute, and Issandrian smiled in what might have been approval.
    At the back of the hall were private meeting rooms, and the least of these was hardly larger than a carriage itself. The dark leather couches ate what little light the candles gave. Daskellin sat in a corner where he could see whoever entered. His back was to the wall, and his sword was undrawn, but near his hand.
    “Well,” Dawson said, lowering himself to the couch opposite, “I see you’ve squandered everything we had in my absence.”
    “Pleasure to see you too,” Canl Daskellin said.
    “How do we go from successfully defending Camnipol from foreign blades to riding behind Feldin Maas? Can you answer that?”
    “Do you want the long answer or the short?”
    “Will the long be less annoying?”
    Daskellin leaned forward.
    “Maas has backing, and we don’t. I had it. Or I thought I did. Then a balance sheet changed or some such, and Clark lit out for Birancour.”
    “It’s what you deserve for working with bankers.”
    “It won’t happen again,” Daskellin said darkly.
    It was as close to an apology as Dawson expected to get. He let the matter slide. Instead, he drained his glass, leaned to the door, and rapped against it until a serving girl appeared to refresh his glass.
    “Where do we stand, then?” Dawson asked when she’d gone.
    Daskellin shook his head, breath hissing out through his teeth.
    “If it comes to the field, we can hold our own. There are enough landholders who still hate Asterilhold that it’s easy enough to rally them.”
    “If Aster dies before he takes the throne?”
    “Then